Field Engineering Manager at Slip Robotics

Description

Slip Robotics is a B2B Robotics-as-a-Service company deploying autonomous loading and unloading robots — SlipBots and SlipLifts — at warehouse and fulfillment sites across North America. Our customers are some of the largest shippers and 3PLs in the industry, and we're scaling fast. We build the robots, we deploy them, and we keep them running.

The Field Engineering Manager owns the engineering backbone of Slip Robotics' field operations: the diagnostic procedures, repair standards, escalation processes, and technical campaigns that determine how reliably our fleet performs in the hands of customers. This is a player-coach role — you will lead a team of Field Engineers while remaining close enough to the technical work to set and enforce high standards.

You are inheriting a capable team and stepping into a function where the opportunity — and expectation — is to replace tribal knowledge and reactive heroics with structure, documented standards, and scalable execution. You will be the connective tissue between what Field Engineers observe at customer sites and what Design, Mechanical, and Product Engineering teams act on.

Responsibilities:

Direct Team

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 3–5 Field Engineers — setting clear performance expectations, individual growth paths, and a team culture grounded in disciplined engineering practice.
• Establish the operating cadences that make the team predictable: structured escalation paths, weekly standups, escalation reviews, and 1:1s that replace reactive firefighting with a defined, repeatable workflow.
• Define and own the diagnostic procedures that Field Engineers follow when resolving product failures in the field — from initial triage through root cause confirmation to repair validation. Every technician who encounters a known failure mode should have a clear, tested procedure to follow.
• Build and maintain a Repair Standards Library covering all SlipBot and SlipLift failure modes: step-by-step remediation procedures, required tooling, and expected outcomes. This library is the team's institutional memory — it must be current, not archival.
• Convert individual expertise into documented, repeatable standards accessible to the entire organization. Knowledge that lives only in someone's head is a liability.
• Own hiring and onboarding for future Field Engineers as the team scales with Slip's growing fleet.

Cross-Functional Partners

• Ensure that field-observed failures reach Service Engineering with sufficient documentation — symptom, context, frequency, and operational impact — to support meaningful root cause investigation.
• Serve as the field's authoritative voice in cross-functional RCA sessions, design reviews, and product development discussions. Translate field observations into engineering-quality inputs without requiring Field Engineers to own the engineering work.
• Partner with Service Engineering on RCA intake protocols, resolution validation, and feedback loops — ensuring fixes developed upstream are validated in the field and outcomes are reported back.
• Translate monthly fleet health findings from Service Engineering into actionable field execution: updated repair standards, new diagnostic procedures, and targeted campaigns.
• Partner with Applications Engineering to ensure fleet-wide technical standards flow into site-specific deployment configuration sheets at the time of new customer onboarding — reducing failures born from inconsistent commissioning.
• Identify configuration or installation patterns that correlate with downstream failures and feed those findings back into Applications Engineering's pre-deployment checklists.
• Maintain JIRA-based tracking for field-side RCA contributions — every open failure with a systemic signature should have a corresponding ticket, owner, and status visible to cross-functional partners.

Fleet and Customers

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of field campaigns: identify the failure or risk (in partnership with Service Engineering), develop the field-side remedy and procedure, coordinate deployment logistics with the team and customers, and confirm resolution across the fleet.
• Prioritize campaigns based on safety impact, customer operational risk, and fleet-wide exposure — not by loudest customer or highest ticket volume.
• Build campaign playbooks executable by any qualified Field Engineer, with clear go/no-go criteria, rollback procedures, and post-campaign validation steps.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex or recurring product failures surfaced through Jira, ensuring resolution with documented, reproducible outcomes — not one-off fixes.
• Establish and track field engineering KPIs: MTTR, first-time fix rate, escalation recurrence rate, and campaign closure rate. Use these to drive continuous improvement and report progress to Service Delivery leadership.
• Own Confluence space as the team's active knowledge platform — documentation must be current, organized, and genuinely used.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in field service engineering, service engineering, or technical support in a hardware or robotics-intensive environment — including direct hands-on diagnosis and repair of complex electro-mechanical systems.
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing diagnostic procedures, repair standards, or technical troubleshooting frameworks used by a team in the field.
• Solid understanding of electro-mechanical systems: motor drives, actuators, sensors, embedded controllers, and the interplay between hardware and software in autonomous platforms.
• Experience contributing to root cause analysis (RCA) processes in collaboration with product or design engineering teams.
• Proficiency with field service tooling: ticketing platforms (Zendesk or equivalent), documentation systems (Confluence), and engineering project tracking (JIRA).
• Familiarity with autonomous mobile robot (AMR) or industrial automation platforms is strongly preferred; ROS familiarity is a plus but not required.
• Ability to read and interpret mechanical drawings, electrical schematics, and technical specifications.
• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related technical field required.

Leadership & Organizational:

• 2+ years of direct people management experience — ideally leading a technical field team with geographically distributed responsibilities.
• Proven track record of building structure in ambiguous environments: creating processes, documentation frameworks, and team norms where none previously existed.
• Strong cross-functional influencer — able to operate credibly with Design, Mechanical, and Product Engineering teams and translate field observations into engineering-quality inputs.
• Excellent written communication skills; able to produce clear, concise technical documentation — procedures, RCA summaries, campaign briefs — that technicians can follow without hand-holding.
• Data-driven operator with the ability to identify trends in service data, prioritize by impact, and communicate findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.
• Comfortable operating at a fast-growing startup: you bring structure without requiring it, move with urgency, and recognize that building the playbook is part of the job.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity in an early-stage robotics company
• Comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision
• Permissive time off policy

Slip Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates on the merits of their experience and their fit for the role. We welcome applicants from every background.