Field Deployment Engineer

Department: R&D

Location: Paris

Employment Type: FullTime

About Us

Harmattan AI is a next-generation defense prime building autonomous and scalable defense systems. Following the close of a $200M Series B, valuing the company at $1.4 billion, we are expanding our teams and capabilities to deliver mission-critical systems to allied forces.

Our work is guided by clear values: building technologies with real-world impact, pursuing excellence in everything we do, setting ambitious goals, and taking on the hardest technical challenges. We operate in a demanding environment where rigor, ownership, and execution are expected.

About the Role

As Field Deployment Engineer, you contribute to how Harmattan deploys and sustains its ground systems in the field, across multiple sites and contracts. You combine hands-on deployment work — installation, commissioning, troubleshooting — with the documentation, methodology, and training materials that make our deployment approach repeatable beyond any single location. You also support the enablement of local deployment teams and interface with our engineering teams on the requirements, fixes, and updates that come out of the field.

This is an engineer-level role with a strong field and hardware lean — not a pure developer role, not a technician role. The dual hardware and software capability is essential. High travel and extended on-site campaigns are core to this position.

Responsibilities

• Site Assessment: Evaluate deployment sites ahead of installation; identify prerequisites, constraints, and installation requirements.

• Hardware Deployment: Install, assemble, connect, and bring up the system's physical components and equipment on site.

• Software Deployment: Install, configure, and parameterise the system's software for each operational context; comfortable on Linux.

• Commissioning: Bring the full system online and verify correct end-to-end functionality across hardware and software.

• Deployment Strategy & Documentation: Contribute to deployment methodology, documentation, and playbooks designed to be used across sites, not just where they were written.

• Local Team Enablement: Support the creation and growth of local deployment teams — building training materials and providing hands-on support.

• Engineering Interface: Interface with engineering teams on product requirements coming from deployments, and on debugging and updates.

• Troubleshooting: Diagnose and resolve hardware, software, and networking issues in the field; feed recurring findings back to engineering.

Candidate Requirements

• 2–5 years of hands-on field or technical experience — field operations, systems integration, test, or manufacturing — with complex, integrated hardware/software systems.

• Proven proficiency across both hardware and software deployment — comfortable assembling and connecting physical equipment and installing, configuring, and parameterising software. This dual capability is essential, not a nice-to-have.

• Electromechanical aptitude: hardware assembly, electrical hookup, ability to read technical diagrams and schematics.

• Networking fundamentals: connectivity setup and diagnostics.

• Systems thinking: ability to reason across an integrated system of multiple subsystems, not a single component.

• Ability to master a system as an expert user and to teach it — strong communication and coaching skills, comfortable training and enabling teams.

• Field temperament: autonomous in austere environments, procedurally rigorous, strong safety mindset in safety-critical operational settings.

• Comfortable with a high travel rate and extended on-site campaigns — this is core to the role.

• Proficiency in English is mandatory; additional languages relevant to the region of operations are a plus.

Nice to Have

• Experience with complex hardware-software integrated systems.

• Exposure to documenting or standardizing a deployment process for use beyond a single site.

• Experience working across multiple sites or geographies.

• Prior experience training or instructing end-users (train-the-trainer).

We look forward to hearing how you can help shape the future of autonomous defense systems at Harmattan AI.