Forward Deployed Engineer, Integrations

Why this role matters

Our customers build rockets, satellites, eVTOLs, clean energy systems, robots, and autonomous vehicles. First Resonance builds the ION Factory OS — the operating system their factories run on.

Almost no factory runs on ION alone. Parts live in a PLM system, purchase orders in an ERP, costs in finance, and a surprising amount of critical process in spreadsheets and homegrown tools. Integrations are the difference between ION being the system of record for how something gets built and ION being one more tab. Right now that work is the single biggest lever on how fast a customer gets real value from us — and it needs an owner.

You will own it end to end: discovery, architecture, implementation, go-live, and keeping it running. Sometimes you will write the code. Sometimes you will direct an internal engineer or an external systems integration partner. Either way the outcome is yours. Over time you will turn what you learn into reusable connectors, reference architectures, and platform improvements, so the tenth integration costs a fraction of the first.

You will work day to day with Forward Deployed Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, Product, and Engineering, and directly with customer engineering and IT teams.

What you’ll own

Customer integrations, end to end:

Discovery and requirements through architecture, estimation, build, test, go-live, documentation, and handoff.

The translation layer:

Turn how a customer actually manages parts, BOMs, purchase orders, receipts, inventory, work orders, quality, and engineering changes into a design that holds up in production.

Build-versus-partner calls:

Decide when we implement directly, reuse an existing connector, enable the customer’s team, or bring in a systems integration partner — then scope the work, set acceptance criteria, review the quality, and hold delivery to it.

Production reliability:

Monitoring, alerting, retries, reconciliation, auditability, and incident response for integrations customers depend on every shift.

Reusable leverage:

Convert one-off implementations into connectors, reference architectures, test harnesses, runbooks, and documentation.

Platform feedback:

Find the recurring gaps in ION’s APIs, eventing, and data model, and work with Product and Engineering to close them for good.

What we’re looking for

• 6+ years in customer-facing or delivery-oriented engineering — solutions architecture, integration engineering, forward deployed engineering, or technical consulting — where you shipped production code yourself.
• You have taken at least one complex enterprise integration from a vague first conversation all the way to running reliably in production.
• Real depth in API-based integration: REST or GraphQL, webhooks, auth protocols, async processing, and data transformation — plus the distributed-systems instincts that go with it, including idempotency, ordering, retries, reconciliation, and observability.
• You are comfortable sitting with a customer’s manufacturing or IT team, hearing an ambiguous process description, and leaving with a scoped technical plan.
• You write and speak clearly enough to explain an architecture, a tradeoff, and a risk to both a staff engineer and a VP of Operations.
• Nice to have
• Manufacturing systems experience — ERP, PLM, MES, procurement, finance, or warehouse platforms. Names we run into often: NetSuite, SAP, Dynamics 365, Teamcenter, Arena, Duro, SolidWorks PDM.
• Integration platforms or middleware such as Prismatic, Boomi, MuleSoft, Workato, or Informatica.
• Connectors, SDKs, or developer documentation you built that other people actually used.
• Comfort with enterprise security and deployment constraints: SSO/OAuth, audit requirements, regulated or on-premise environments, restricted networks.
• Background in aerospace, defense, or advanced manufacturing.