Forward Deployed Engineer

Orbital Industries is an AI Industrial company, with frontier AI embedded at every step in the production of critical physical products - from creating advanced materials to engineering and manufacturing.

Every Orbital Industries product is developed using CurieOS, our AI operating system, uniting AI-automated hardware engineering with AI-designed material science to achieve breakthrough real-world performance. We also offer CurieOS to our customers and partners, extending the same platform and workflows that power Orbital Industries to their own teams and products.

We have an ambitious mission and need excellent people in all our teams - AI research, operations, advanced materials, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and manufacturing.

Working at Orbital Industries means working in vertically integrated teams across the full stack, from molecules to manufacturing. We're looking for people who have a love of physical technology, curiosity in AI and a desire to learn.

Role Overview

Orbital's AI software platform, CurieOS, is used by scientists and engineers to design and build products serving critical industries. Powering this software are our world leading AI models in advanced materials, hardware engineering and simulation.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Orbital you will deliver CurieOS into customer environments hands-on, writing production code, designing architectures, building integrations and solving problems across the full breadth of industrial R&D. You will embed with customer teams, translate ambiguous high-value problems into working systems, and build solutions that become part of how their scientists and engineers work day-to-day.

First and foremost, we want to work with someone with a love of craftsmanship, continual learning and building systems that scale.

Key Responsibilities

Deliver deployments hands-on, across the breadth of industrial R&D

• Deliver complex customer deployments hands-on, writing production code, designing architectures, building integrations and debugging issues across CurieOS and customer systems
• Design and build systems that connect heterogeneous software, data and physical infrastructure, from simulation campaigns and digital twins to lab instruments, test rigs and CAD/PLM systems
• Build solutions that become embedded in how customer scientists and engineers work day-to-day

Build and deploy

• Embed with customer teams to understand ambiguous, high-value R&D problems, challenge assumptions and identify where CurieOS can deliver meaningful impact
• Translate those problems into a technical approach, milestones and acceptance criteria, making pragmatic architecture and scope trade-offs as you learn
• Build evaluation loops with customer scientists and engineers, defining workflow-specific benchmarks and acceptance criteria that prove the system works in their world
• Own your engagement from initial technical discovery through implementation, production deployment and adoption, including technical quality
• Track KPIs per engagement (screening throughput, design-cycle reduction, experiments avoided) and communicate progress and outcomes to customer stakeholders

Learn and adapt

• Rapidly upskill across unfamiliar scientific and engineering domains by collaborating with domain experts, no prior chemistry, materials, or engineering experience required
• Codify successful approaches into reusable integration patterns, tooling and playbooks so every engagement makes the next one faster
• Feed field signal to the platform engineering team to shape the CurieOS roadmap

What We’re Looking For

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of independently building, shipping and operating production software
• A track record of succeeding in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where requirements evolve through direct iteration with users
• The ability to move fluidly between conversations with customer scientists and engineers and deep technical implementation work
• Experience deploying software into complex production environments
• A genuine interest in building software that enables breakthrough scientific and industrial applications

Orbital is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.