About the RoleWe're looking for a VP of Field Engineering to lead and scale the organization responsible for turning Pelico's technology into measurable outcomes for customers.
This leader will oversee Forward Deployed Engineering and Tech Delivery teams, partnering with global manufacturers to deploy AI-powered operational workflows in some of the most complex production environments in the world. Sitting at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and Customer Operations, they will help define how Pelico's platform scales across customers while building the teams and operating model required for the company's next stage of growth.
The ideal candidate brings a rare combination of technical depth, customer leadership, and operational excellence, with the ability to navigate conversations ranging from AI architecture and data systems to executive strategy and organizational design.
What You'll Do- Lead and scale Pelico's Field Engineering organization, bringing together Tech Delivery and Forward Deployed Engineering under unified leadership
- Own senior technical customer relationships across enterprise accounts, partnering directly with IT executives, architects, and operational stakeholders
- Oversee complex enterprise deployments and integrations across manufacturing, supply chain, and operational systems
- Drive operational excellence across deployment quality, scalability, reliability, and customer technical success
- Partner cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Customer Operations to ensure seamless delivery and continuous product improvement
- Build scalable processes, tooling, and organizational structure to support rapid company growth and increasingly complex customer environments
- Recruit, mentor, and develop high-performing technical leaders and customer-facing engineering teams
- Act as a strategic escalation point for critical customer technical issues and complex implementation challenges
- Support security, infrastructure, and compliance initiatives as the organization scales, including potential involvement in FedRAMP-related processes
About You- 12+ years of experience leading technical customer-facing organizations within enterprise software, AI, infrastructure, data platforms, or industrial technology companies
- Proven experience managing and scaling multiple technical functions, such as Forward Deployed Engineering, DevOps, Solutions Architecture, Technical Delivery, or Customer Engineering
- Experience designing, building, shipping, and operating production-grade software systems end-to-end
- Experience creating, deploying, and maintaining LLM-powered applications and AI agents in production environments
- Experience building and owning data pipelines across the full data lifecycle, from ingestion and transformation through orchestration and monitoring
- Strong technical foundation in software architecture, cloud infrastructure, enterprise integrations, and operational platforms
- Experience with Python, SQL, PostgreSQL, Docker, and Apache Airflow
- Experience deploying complex technical systems into enterprise customer environments and driving measurable operational outcomes
- Comfortable operating across both executive-level customer conversations and deeply technical architecture discussions
- Proven ability to build high-performing teams, scale technical organizations, and establish operational rigor in high-growth environments
- Strong engineering instincts with a focus on code quality, reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability
- Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills across technical and non-technical audiences
- You actively leverage modern AI tools and workflows in your day-to-day work and are excited about the practical application of AI systems in enterprise environments
Nice to Have- Experience within manufacturing, aerospace & defense, supply chain, industrial software, or operational technology environments
- Background in Forward Deployed Engineering, Customer Engineering, Technical Delivery, or enterprise AI deployments
- Familiarity with security and compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP
- Experience operating within high-growth startup environments
- Experience with Java
Why PelicoWe're building something genuinely hard and genuinely important. Here's what that comes with:
- Meaningful equity - you're building this with us, so you'll own a piece of it
- Competitive salary benchmarked to your market
- Flexible, hybrid work model - we care about output, not face time
- Health, dental, and vision coverage
- Learning & development budget - we invest in people who invest in themselves
- Opportunity to work with some of the world's most complex and fascinating manufacturing operations
- A team that takes the work seriously without taking themselves too seriously
- High ownership, high impact role with direct influence on company growth, customer success, and organizational scale
