Forward Deployed Executive

About us

Re-architecting Engineering for the Age of Intelligence

PhysicsX is the physics AI company for industrials. The company’s mission is to accelerate hardware innovation by overhauling what industrial engineering and manufacturing look like today. PhysicsX is building a new simulation software stack to deliver deep physics AI enablement across the entire engineering lifecycle. The company partners with leading organisations in aerospace & defence, automotive, semiconductors, materials, and energy & renewables, supporting them on some of their most critical and complex challenges. PhysicsX is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in London, New York, and Singapore and an expanding presence in the Bay Area.

The Role

PhysicsX builds AI driven simulation software for aerospace, automotive, energy, semiconductor and defence customers, and our Asia Pacific business is growing fast from a new office in Singapore. As Forward Deployed Executive, you are the senior technical executive for our most strategic accounts in the region, the person who takes a customer mission from first conversation to a deployed, adopted platform.

You will run missions. A mission is a time boxed outcome defined with the customer. Most need the PhysicsX platform deployed, adopted and working inside the customer's own environment, often on premise or air gapped, and then handed over smoothly to the account team. Other missions include new partnership deep dives and building internal capability. You will operate as a peer of customer CTOs, CIOs and heads of engineering, and as a partner to our delivery, product, research and commercial leaders.

This is an executive role, not a regional deployment manager role. You report to a member of the executive team and start with no direct reports, so you can land, learn the business and shape what the team around you should become. The model draws on Palantir's Echo, Google's Office of the CTO and Microsoft's GBB teams, adapted to an AI driven physics platform.

What You Will Own

• Missions across the region. Define what success looks like for each mission and for Asia Pacific as a whole, then drive it through the delivery, product and research teams you influence, with or without formal authority over them. You own the execution outcome of three or more missions at a time. The true outcomes are customer adoption and a smooth handover to account teams.
• The executive relationship. Be the senior technical voice to customer CTOs, CIOs and heads of engineering: scoping missions, resolving escalations, and holding service level and partner conversations. In markets where doors open through trusted introductions, you build the relationships that open them.
• Organisational navigation. Work through customer compliance, legal, procurement and security reviews, internal politics and change management. Move the customer from a bespoke solution to relying on the platform, and own the adoption roadmap that gets them there.
• Regional strategy. Work with the executive team on which markets, accounts and use cases PhysicsX pursues in Asia Pacific, and which it does not. Make the trade offs that are right for the whole company, including with local partners and intermediaries.
• Deployment into sensitive environments. Set the approach for deploying and upgrading the platform in sovereign data centres, on premise and air gapped customer environments, and for how upgrades land on a cadence customers can plan around.
• Field signal back into the product. Turn what you learn on the ground into reusable patterns, frameworks and standards, and make sure it reaches product and research so that customer work becomes product.
• The standard for forward deployed work. Set the tone for how we show up in front of customers, mentor the engineers and leaders around you, and help hire strong people into the region. As the function grows you will help shape the team that forms around you.
• Hands on when it counts. For a novel environment, a difficult security review or an escalation that needs senior technical judgement, you step in directly.

Where You Will Work

You are based in our Singapore office and travel constantly: the region spans five priority countries, several time zones and flights of around eight hours, with no single hub that reaches every customer.

Market Priority Industries in focus How access works Singapore Home base, first priority Marine and offshore energy, mining and chemicals, aerospace, applied research Four active customer relationships today, plus close work with government and research bodies Japan First priority Automotive, electronics, IT and industrial Relationship gated: doors open through intermediaries, incumbent channels and trusted seniors Korea First priority Automotive and semiconductor Relationship gated, with sovereign data centres that shape how we deploy Australia Priority market Mining, energy, life sciences and aerospace Built through road shows and local presence, including simulation engineers in Perth Taiwan Priority market, after Japan, Singapore and Korea Electronics and semiconductor Relationship gated, developed alongside local partners

Expect regular multi day trips to customers in these markets, with occasional travel to our New York and London offices. The ability to be credible in a room in Tokyo one week and a mine site in Western Australia the next is part of the job.

What We Are Looking For

• Hands on software and AI implementation. You have implemented software and AI across mixed customer environments and got it adopted. That means forward deployed software engineering (FDSE) experience, practical AI implementation experience and a working grasp of evals. You hold the technical bar for the work around you.
• A record of senior customer facing technical leadership. You have led complex deployments or customer programmes for enterprise software or platforms in large organisations, and can show recent evidence of owning delivery at scale.
• Experience in regulated, high security environments. You have worked in on premise, air gapped or sovereign data environments and understand how security, compliance and approval processes shape what is possible.
• Executive presence and trust. You have built lasting relationships with CTOs, CIOs and heads of engineering, and you are straight with them about timelines, constraints and what is realistic.
• Infrastructure fluency. You can hold your own on Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure and how enterprise platforms are versioned and released, enough to be credible in sovereign and air gapped environments.
• Judgement in ambiguity. You are comfortable defining success where the path is not established and the role is still taking shape. You hold strong opinions loosely and change them when the evidence changes.
• Influence without authority. You move teams and organisations through clarity, documentation, training and example rather than reporting lines.
• Organisational navigation. You have taken customers through compliance, legal, procurement and security reviews and the internal politics and change management around them, and moved a customer from a bespoke solution to relying on a platform.
• Calm, mature judgement under pressure. You earn trust quickly with senior customers and with engineers, and you stay measured when things break.
• Readiness for the region. You are based in, or willing to relocate to, Singapore, comfortable with extensive travel across Asia Pacific, and respectful of markets where relationships come before transactions.

Nice To Have

• Experience in a forward deployed, field engineering or office of the CTO function at a platform, data or AI company.
• Exposure to simulation, CAE, HPC or physics based products, or to the engineering industries we serve.
• Prior work in Japan, Korea, Taiwan or Australia, or fluency in Japanese, Korean or Mandarin.
• An existing network among technical leaders in automotive, semiconductor, resources, energy or aerospace in Asia Pacific.
• Security clearance, or experience operating inside government or defence environments.
• Experience building support, service or customer success functions around a technical product.

What We Offer

Open a region. You report to a member of the executive team and start with no direct reports, with a mandate to open Asia Pacific from our new Singapore office and decide what the team around you becomes.

Build what actually matters. Help shape an AI native engineering company at a formative stage, tackling problems that genuinely matter for industry and society.

Learn alongside exceptional people. Work with a high caliber, collaborative team of engineers, scientists and operators who care deeply about doing great work and about helping each other get better.

Influence over hierarchy. We operate with a flat structure where good ideas win wherever they come from. Questioning assumptions and challenging the status quo is expected.

Sustainable pace, long term ambition. Building meaningful technology is a marathon, not a sprint. We balance ambitious work with a life beyond it.

Equity options. Share meaningfully in the company you are helping to build.

 

We value diversity and are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, age, sexual orientation or gender identity. We strongly encourage individuals from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech to apply. To help make a change, we sponsor bright women from disadvantaged backgrounds through their university degrees in science and mathematics. 

 

We collect diversity and inclusion data solely for the purpose of monitoring the effectiveness of our equal opportunities policies and ensuring compliance with employment and equality legislation. This information is confidential, used only in aggregate form, and will not influence the outcome of your application.