Gauss Labs is an industrial AI company on a mission to revolutionize manufacturing with AI, starting with the semiconductor sector. Panoptes VM is an AI-based virtual metrology solution deployed in high-volume manufacturing fabs, helping customers improve yield, reduce costs, and accelerate production. Our software runs in our customers' own managed environments, and we're seeking a Forward Deployed Operations Engineer to serve as the first responder for customers and internal teams working with our software in customer-managed environments.
You will manage the Help Desk as your primary day-to-day duty: diagnosing and resolving incoming inquiries from customers, resolving a growing share independently as you build up the diagnostic knowledge base, and for anything requiring other teams, owning the ticket through to resolution. Beyond the Help Desk, you will own scheduled technical communication with the customer: coordinating deployment schedules, sharing deployment progress, and handling resource approval requests on behalf of internal teams. System and platform incident response remains owned by our SRE team, while you own customer-facing communication during incidents; this role does not carry an infrastructure on-call rotation.
If you have built your career as a Field Application Engineer (FAE), Technical Support Engineer (TSE), or Technical Account Manager (TAM) and want to bring that experience into enterprise AI software, this role was designed for you: you will work forward-deployed alongside a leading global semiconductor manufacturer as the technical communication owner for Panoptes VM.
Responsibilities
- Own the Help Desk for Panoptes VM: serve as the point of contact for service-desk tickets and end-user and internal-team inquiries about our software running in the customer-managed environment, including API-related requests from the customer's overseas campuses.
- Diagnose and resolve incoming inquiries wherever the knowledge base and access allow — investigating logs, metrics, and the customer environment directly rather than routing by default.
- Own each service-desk ticket through to resolution: after routing to the responsible team, actively follow up, coordinate across teams, chase blockers, and keep the customer updated until the issue is closed.
- Coordinate deployment schedules with the customer's IT organization and share deployment progress across staging and production environments, from start to completion.
- Handle resource approval requests toward the customer on behalf of internal development teams.
- Execute or coordinate all customer-facing communication under the change management and incident response SOPs, including customer notification and updates during declared critical incidents.
- Coordinate customer-environment changes through to completion: handle internal teams' requests and customer-side changes, aligning the request, timing, and impact across the customer and the internal teams who carry out the work.
- Escalate to engineering only where code or infrastructure changes are required, with clear, reproducible, well-documented context.
- Build and own the support knowledge base: actively capture diagnostic and resolution best practices from SRE and software engineering teams, and document recurring issues as runbooks so they become independently resolvable.
- Use observability tooling to investigate and resolve issues.
- Work is primarily during Korean business hours, with off-hours availability for customer-facing communication during declared critical incidents and when customer-side maintenance requires it.
Basic Qualifications
- 10+ years in technical support, support engineering, or customer-facing engineering roles, with hands-on troubleshooting
- Ability to diagnose and resolve technical issues independently
- Comfortable triaging technical inquiries and routing them across multiple teams, with strong follow-through
- Working knowledge of distributed systems (Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, microservices) — enough to reason about how a request flows across services, understand the environment, read inquiries, and communicate clearly with engineering teams
- Familiarity with ticketing / service-desk tools (e.g., Jira) and observability tooling (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch)
- Basic scripting / coding ability (Python, Bash)
- Strong customer communication skills; native or fluent Korean for customer communication, and working proficiency in English (reading and writing) for internal documentation and technical coordination with engineering teams
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting software deployed in customer-managed (on-prem or customer-cloud) environments
- Familiarity with escalation and hand-off processes between support and engineering teams
- Field support or field service experience for semiconductor fab equipment, or direct exposure to fab operations and tooling
- Exposure to manufacturing, semiconductor, or enterprise B2B customer environments
[interview process]
Application review - Phone interview - Virtual onsite interview - Core value interview - CEO interview
