Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

This isn't a remote support role, you're building the product shoulder-to-shoulder with the people using it. Navi is already live at major flight schools across the country, and every one of them wants more - dashboards, tools, the workflow features that make their day run better. You're the person who embeds with a customer, learns their operation, and builds exactly what they need, fast.

You're a compulsive builder who can scope and ship end to end on your own - you'd empathize with the customer's needs and show them something working by tomorrow. You don't bring a playbook; you reason from the actual situation and believe any problem can be figured out. You have the run-through-walls grit of a founder, the technical bar of a real engineer, and genuine curiosity about how a flight school runs - because that's where the best features come from. The simplest test: would a chief instructor and an engineer both want you in the trenches?

Every feature you ship makes a customer more committed, and the signal you bring back from the field - the edge cases, the workflow friction, the things nobody thought of - sharpens the whole product. You're not just serving one customer. You're supercharging how fast this company learns.

What You'll Do

• Embed with a customer until you understand their operation extremely well
• Build the dashboards, tools, and features they're asking for, and ship them fast
• Gather field intelligence - user feedback, edge cases, performance data, workflow observations - and bring it back to product and engineering in a way that drives action
• Own the customer relationship on the ground - you are Navi's face at every site you touch
• Work directly with engineering to compress the feedback loop between field reality and product iteration

About You

• You can build and ship an app, dashboard, or internal tool end to end, by yourself - design, code, deploy
• You learn a domain fast and can smoothly own talking to a chief instructor one hour and debugging at your desk the next
• You stay effective when there's no manual, no clear owner, and the requirements keep changing
• You're comfortable embedding with a customer and flexible about travel
• You read a room and build trust fast - customers want you back on site, and you can turn a vague ask into a clear plan they're bought into

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with aviation systems, flight schools, avionics, or defense operations
• Pilot certificate or flight training experience
• Experience working on military installations, flight schools, or in DoW environments

Why This Role Matters

• Navi's technology only matters if it works where it counts - in the cockpit, the briefing room, the ops center.
• You're the person who makes that happen.
• Every site you deploy is a new proof point.
• Every feature you ship makes a customer more committed.
• Every insight you bring back compounds across the whole product.
• You close the gap between product and reality - and that's what lets this company scale without breaking.

What You'll Get

• Flight training - earn your pilot's license and work with true domain expertise
• Competitive salary and full travel coverage - flights, lodging
• Impact you can see - work directly with pilots, instructors, and military operators using what you deployed
• A role that scales into field operations leadership as we grow

How We Work

• Find a way. We don't wait for permission or perfect information. Ideas come from anywhere regardless of title. Figure it out, ship it, iterate.
• Creativity over control. First principles over process. We'd rather have a creative solution that's 80% right today than a perfect one next quarter.
• Update fast. Come in with a hypothesis, throw it away when the data says otherwise. Ego has no place here.
• Intensity with focus. We work hard because the mission demands it. Clarity on what matters is how we make that sustainable.