Job Description
Job description About Applied Computing Applied Computing was founded in 2024 to build Orbital, a physics-informed foundation model for energy operations. We’re live across oil and gas, refineries, and petrochemicals, working towards our mission: sustainable abundance for a growing planet. The hydrocarbon industry keeps the world running. But its complexity has left operators tied to legacy systems, making critical decisions on less than 10% of available data. We built Orbital to change that. It’s a foundation model built specifically for energy that lets companies use AI at scale, harnessing all of their operational data and optimising in real time for any metric. Decisions get faster, operations get safer, and carbon intensity falls. We’ve raised over $32 million, including one of the largest seed rounds for an AI company in the UK. We’re just getting started Job requirements The Role Orbital is deployed live inside customer sites across oil and gas, refineries, and petrochemicals. The people who need to use it are process engineers, control room operators, and plant managers. Most have spent decades running these plants and never used an LLM. The Adoption Engineer gets them using it. You arrive at a customer site, spend a few weeks embedded with a team, and leave when they’re using Orbital on their own. You’ll run 2-4 of these engagements at a time. You execute the playbook we’ve already built. You don’t rewrite it from scratch. When it breaks in the field, and it will, you write down what happened and push it back in. The Person You’re at ease in industrial environments. You can walk into a control room on shift change and be useful by the end of the day. You don’t need to know hydrocracking. You do need to pick up context quickly and avoid bluffing. Operators spot a bluff in minutes. You like working on-site. You travel without drama. Most weeks, you’ll be at a customer plant. You’ve run training sessions before. You know they’re not enough. People don’t change how they work because they sat through a workshop. Essential Experience • You’ve worked in a customer-facing role where the product was technically complex and the users were expert adults. • You’ve embedded at customer sites before. You know how to behave on a plant floor. • You can translate what a product does into the user’s actual workflow. • You’re comfortable with usage data. You look at it without being asked. • You travel without drama. This role has significant international travel. Nice to Haves • Direct work in oil and gas, refining, petrochemicals, or renewables. • A background in process or operational engineering. • Experience adopting AI or data products where the hard part was trust in the output. What Success Looks Like Days 1-30 You’ve been out on at least one live engagement to see how it’s done. You’ve read the customer briefs and met the forward deployed and delivery leads for each account. You’ve agreed what your accounts need first. Days 30-90 You’ve run your first sprint on your own. Your accounts have a plan. Weekly reporting on adoption is live. Months 3-6 You’ve closed out a sprint. A customer team is using Orbital daily without you on site. At least one champion is running their own sessions. Months 6-12 You’re running multiple engagements in parallel. Adoption on your accounts is ahead of baseline. You’ve pushed real content back into the playbook. How We Work 32 people. Flat. Team leads run their own areas. High autonomy expected, low tolerance for process theatre. Decisions over debate. Adoption Engineers report to the Head of Adoption. You’ll work daily with forward deployed engineering, delivery, commercial, and whoever owns the customer on your accounts. Travel is part of the job. So is pushing back when the plan doesn’t fit what you see on the ground. Job responsibilities 1.Run on-site adoption engagements • Show up at customer sites and embed with the team for the length of the engagement. • Run sessions with operators and engineers using their own workflows as the material, not generic demos. • Stay until the team is using Orbital without you. 2. Build customer champions • Find the operators and engineers with the credibility to bring colleagues along. Peer credibility matters more than job title. • Spend disproportionate time with them. • Before you leave, at least one champion should be running their own internal sessions. 3. Work with Forward Deployed and delivery • Forward deployed engineers own the technical install. You own whether the team uses it. Work with them so the adoption work sits alongside a working deployment. • Don’t run adoption on top of a broken deployment. Time it. • When users hit blockers, write them up with enough detail that the product team can act. What they tried, where they stopped, what they wanted instead. 4. Track adoption • Track daily active users, workflows completed, and champion activity on each account. • Report weekly. Escalate anything slipping before it becomes a commercial problem. • Feed patterns across accounts back so the team can see what’s common versus one-off. 5. Improve the playbook • You work from what we’ve built. • When something breaks, write it down and push it back in. Same when something works better than expected. • Push back when the playbook doesn’t fit the account you’re in. What This Role Is Not • Not customer success. You’re not managing the commercial relationship or owning renewals. • Not training. A workshop is one tool you’ll use. • Not support. Bug reports go to someone else. • Not consultancy. You’re not there to do the work for the customer. • Not remote. You’ll be on customer sites most weeks during active engagements. Job benefits Compensation and benefits shared at offer stage