Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

Connect the world's largest industrial companies to IOI, and automate what they run.

About the company

The company is an industrial automation and research company building IOI, the Internet of Industrials: a standardized protocol that lets industrial systems communicate their physical state and capabilities to software, AI agents, and one another.

The internet gave computers a common language. The physical economy still doesn't have one. Factories, fleets, warehouses, and soon robots run on closed systems that can't see or command each other, so most coordination still happens by phone, email, and spreadsheet.

Our thesis is that logistics is the foundational language of industry. Nearly every physical business can be described with the same primitives: what exists, where it is, where it needs to go, capacity, time, cost, constraints, storage, and transformation. IOI translates those states, wherever they live today (ERPs, TMSs, WMSs, sensors, vehicles, factory floors), into one permissioned, machine-readable context and command layer.

Every company on IOI runs its own node. Nodes are secure, customer-owned, and private by default, and they connect to other nodes, autonomous systems, and hardware only with the owner's permission. Each node gives a company a searchable, AI-ready picture of its physical operations and a way to act on it.

We prove the protocol by running real applications on it. Juno, our AI agent, reasons over the network to price, coordinate, and execute work autonomously, and the company Rideshare, the first service built on IOI, moves freight on trucks already traveling the right direction. Trucks are the beginning. The same foundation lets factories coordinate production, robots discover and execute tasks, and autonomous fleets respond to demand.

We want to help American industry build more, move faster, and compete globally.

Founder Profile

Phillip, the company's founder, co-founded Isotrex, a multinational defense manufacturer, with his brother at 16. Running factories showed him that the machines, systems, and companies of the physical economy have no common way to understand each other. He wrote "The Physical Economy Has No Index" and started the company to build that common language.

About This Role

You'll take an enterprise from kickoff to a live IOI node, then put that node to work. You'll sit with IT, operations, and supply chain teams, map their ERP, warehouse, transportation, and sensor data into IOI's primitives, and build the automations that replace their manual coordination. Then you'll turn what you learned into connectors and playbooks so every next deployment goes faster.

You'll work with Phillip, our engineering leads, and our enterprise commercial team.

Your First 90 Days

By day 30: ship a production integration that brings a major enterprise or fleet system into IOI, and know our primitives and node architecture cold.

By day 60: lead an IOI node deployment from discovery to production, with the first automated workflow live for that customer.

By day 90: own the technical relationship for two or three enterprises, and ship a reusable connector for a system you've now integrated more than once.

Responsibilities

• Deploy IOI nodes. Connect ERP, WMS, TMS, MES, and telemetry sources to customer-owned nodes in the cloud.
• Translate operations into primitives. Model a company's inventory, facilities, assets, and flows in IOI's common language.
• Automate industrial stacks. Find the manual coordination hiding in an operation and replace it with agent-driven workflows on IOI.
• Build what's missing. Write production-quality connectors, transforms, and EDI and API integrations.
• Be the customer's engineer. Run technical discovery, scope work, and earn trust with IT and operations leaders.
• Feed the protocol. Bring field insight back to the IOI and applications teams, and turn repeated work into product.

Requirements

• Hands-on integration with enterprise systems: ERP (SAP S/4HANA, Oracle), WMS (Manhattan, Blue Yonder), TMS (Oracle OTM, MercuryGate, or similar), or MES.
• EDI X12 (204, 210, 214, 856, 990) and transport methods such as AS2 and SFTP.
• REST and SOAP APIs, webhooks, and authentication schemes used in enterprise environments.
• Data mapping, ETL/ELT pipelines, and strong SQL.
• Production code in Java or TypeScript, plus Python for scripting and data work.
• Cloud deployment and infrastructure as code (Azure, Terraform).
• Technical discovery, scoping, and clear written documentation for customer stakeholders.
• Nice to have: industrial telemetry protocols (MQTT, OPC UA); fleet telematics platforms (Samsara, Motive); workflow automation and LLM agent tooling; supply chain consulting or solutions engineering; manufacturing or warehouse operations experience.
• 4+ years of production engineering, with significant customer-facing or implementation time.
• You stay calm in a room of skeptical IT architects and leave with a plan everyone agrees to.
• You like being the person who makes it actually work, on site if that's what it takes.
• You see patterns across deployments and want to turn them into product.
• Why the company
• Every node you deploy makes a company's physical operations visible and programmable, often for the first time. You'll see the inside of how America's largest companies make and move goods, and you'll help define how they connect to everything else.
• Skills: TypeScript, Data Warehousing, Data Modeling, AI Agents
• Experience: 3+ years
• Visa: US citizen/visa only