Deployed Engineer Lead

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
• Current part 107 commercial drone pilots' licenses or the ability to obtain it

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
• Prior experience with DJI systems

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