Forward-Deployed Engineering Lead at Paladin (S18) $110K - $150K We deploy autonomous drones to 911 calls. Our software gives first responders a live overhead view of a scene before they arrive. Houston, TX, US / Remote Full-time Will sponsor 3+ years About Paladin Paladin deploys autonomous drones to 911 calls. Our first drone, Knighthawk, arrives on the scene of an emergency in under 90 seconds and gives first responders a live overhead view of the scene before they arrive, helping reduce response times and increase situational awareness. Knighthawk is a fully autonomous LTE drone with unlimited range, a 55 minute battery life, and is responding to over 130 calls each week across several cities. Over the next decade, our tech will be in every city across the world helping first responders save lives. About the role Skills: C++, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, TypeScript About Paladin Paladin builds Drone-as-First-Responder systems that get eyes on emergencies in under 90 seconds. Our autonomous drones, LTE connectivity, and Watchtower platform help police, fire, and EMS make faster, safer decisions. Role Summary You will lead Paladin’s forward-deployed reliability function—owning 24/7 customer support, hands-on hotfixes, and onsite remediation. You’ll dive into code when needed, ship patches safely, build customer-facing tools and internal utilities, and manage a small triage pod. You’re equal parts incident commander, field engineer, and player-coach who turns real-world issues into stable, scalable solutions. What You’ll Do Own 24/7 Reliability: Run an on-call rotation covering critical incidents across software, firmware, networking/LTE, and on-site hardware setups (docks, sensors, EXT/compute, cabling). Hands-on Engineering: Triage issues, reproduce defects, write/merge hotfixes, and upstream fixes to core services with tests, feature flags, and safe deploys. Onsite Remediation: Travel to customer sites for high-severity issues, new site stabilizations, and complex integrations; coordinate with local stakeholders and vendors. Lead the Triage Pod: Hire, schedule, coach, and performance-manage a small team of forward-deployed/support engineers and contractors. Build Tools & Products: Create small services, scripts, and dashboards that solve recurring customer pain (telemetry, log scrapers, health checks, alerting, one-click diagnostics). Run Incident Management: Establish SEV levels, lead bridges, drive comms (internal/external), deliver RCAs within SLA, and track corrective actions to closure. Operational Excellence: Maintain runbooks, golden signals/SLOs, playbooks, and site commissioning checklists; push automation to eliminate manual toil. Partner Cross-Functionally: Work tightly with Customer Success, Product, and Core Eng to prioritize fixes, capture field insights, and harden releases before wide rollouts. Security & Compliance: Handle sensitive data responsibly, follow access controls, and ensure logs/RCAs meet public-safety expectations. Readiness & Training: Level up CS and field partners with training, shadowing, and cert programs; ensure every site has a clear “break-glass” plan. Qualifications 2–4+ years in Support/DevOps/SRE/Platform/Firmware or full-stack roles with direct on-call ownership; 1–2+ years leading small teams or rotations. Strong debugging across at least two layers: backend services (Python/Go/Node), web clients, Linux, networking (LTE/VPN/DNS), edge devices, or embedded/Linux SBCs (e.g., Jetson). Proven incident management in production environments; disciplined use of logs, metrics, traces, and safe rollout patterns (canary, feature flags, rollback). Comfortable reading and modifying code, writing tests, and merging hotfixes to production under pressure. Excellent customer communication—clear, calm, and accountability-first. Ability to travel on short notice; valid driver’s license; comfortable around rooftops/docks and light hands-on hardware work. Nice to Have Public safety, robotics, autonomy, or telecom experience. Cloud ops (GCP/AWS), Terraform, container orchestration, CI/CD. C++, Python, React/TypeScript familiarity FAA/DFR familiarity; RF/interference troubleshooting; ADS-B/UTM exposure. Background working with secure environments and audit-ready processes. On-Call & Travel Expectations On-call: Participates in and manages a 24/7 rotation; off-hours and weekends as needed. Travel: ~30–60% variable; spikes for critical incidents, new city launches, and complex integrations. Tools You Might Use Python/Go/Node • Linux • Docker • GitHub Actions • Feature-flagging • Cloud (GCP/AWS) • VPN/LTE diagnostics • Serial/SSH • Issue trackers & incident tooling (Jira, Linear, PagerDuty Equal Opportunity Paladin is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to a safe, inclusive workplace. Technology We build LTE-enabled autonomous drones that respond to 911 calls and can stream a live video feed with subsecond latency over celluar networks. Our drones have unlimited range, a 55+ minute battery life, and can be controlled from anywhere in the world with the touch of one button. Our stack is divided into software, hardware, electrical, embedded, and video engineering all tied into one system that helps first responders save lives.