Forward Deployed Design Lead — Product Lifecycle Management

About Avathon 

Avathon is the leading Industrial AI autonomy platform, helping customers across heavy industries — energy, mining, manufacturing, aerospace, defense, and logistics — accelerate the journey toward autonomous operations. Our platform is built on a Computational Knowledge Graph foundation that contextualizes and connects operational data across siloed systems, bringing together time series, structured, unstructured, and machine vision data to power AI-driven applications in asset performance management, supply chain intelligence, visual AI, and global trade management. 

With capabilities spanning digital twins, normal behavior modeling, natural language processing, and computer vision, Avathon delivers real-time predictive intelligence and agentic decision-making at industrial scale. 

About the Role 

The Forward Deployed Design Lead — PLM is embedded directly at customer sites as the primary experience and implementation owner for Avathon's Product Lifecycle Management deployments. You live at the intersection of PLM domain knowledge and experience design, responsible for configuring, implementing, and continuously improving how engineering teams, manufacturing planners, and quality engineers interact with Avathon's AI layer across their PLM environment. 

You will spend Monday through Thursday working alongside CAD engineers, PLM administrators, and manufacturing process owners — mapping BOM workflows, configuring integrations with PLM and ERP systems, designing the screens and workflows users will rely on daily, and driving adoption from go-live through steady-state operations. Fridays are typically remote for synthesis, documentation, and cross-team collaboration. 

Key Responsibilities 

PLM Implementation & Configuration 

• Own end-to-end implementation of Avathon's AI platform within customer PLM environments — configuring product structure hierarchies, BOM variants, change workflow rules, and AI-enriched analytics views to match each customer's engineering and manufacturing context 

• Lead functional configuration of PLM-adjacent modules: engineering change order (ECO) tracking, eBOM/mBOM/sBOM linkage, part master data enrichment, effectivity management, and configuration control workflows aligned to customer standards 

• Set up and validate integrations between Avathon's platform and customer PLM systems (Siemens Teamcenter, PTC Windchill, Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE, SAP PLM, Oracle Agile PLM) — ensuring BOM data, change notifications, and lifecycle state transitions flow accurately and traceably 

• Configure data pipelines from CAD/PDM sources and ERP systems — validating part metadata extraction, revision mapping, and BOM hand-off logic in live engineering environments 

• Conduct go-live readiness checks — verifying integration health, data completeness, user access, and workflow configuration before each deployment milestone 

Experience Design & Workflow Mapping 

• Lead onsite discovery and process mapping sessions — working directly with PLM administrators, CAD engineers, manufacturing engineers, and IT architects to document current-state workflows and define the future-state experience on Avathon's platform 

• Produce implementation-grade design artifacts: annotated screen flows, configured BOM view layouts, change workflow diagrams, alert routing specs, and role-based dashboard definitions — directly actionable by the engineering team without further interpretation 

• Design and validate end-user interfaces within Avathon's PLM-adjacent surfaces: BOM comparison views, engineering change dashboards, digital thread navigation, and AI-driven part similarity and anomaly detection screens 

• Facilitate working sessions with engineering and manufacturing stakeholders to validate designs against real workflow scenarios — iterating in real time based on user feedback before configuration is locked 

• Ensure designs reflect the operational realities of PLM users: structured review cycles, multi-discipline concurrency, cross-site data sharing, and the precision demands of engineering documentation and compliance 

User Adoption & Change Management 

• Design and execute role-specific onboarding programs — building training plans, hands-on exercises, quick-reference guides, and SOPs tailored to how each PLM user group (PLM administrator, design engineer, manufacturing planner, quality engineer, change board member) will use Avathon daily 

• Conduct live training sessions and hands-on working sessions at client sites — coaching engineering teams through new AI-augmented change management and BOM analytics capabilities with the domain credibility to earn their trust 

• Identify adoption barriers early — distrust of AI-generated insights, workflow disruption, data quality concerns — and develop targeted interventions in partnership with client PLM leads and process owners 

• Track adoption metrics post-go-live (active users, change workflow utilization, BOM accuracy rates, AI recommendation acceptance) and use data to drive continuous improvement sprints with the client 

• Serve as the primary point of contact for end-user questions, configuration requests, and workflow adjustments during hypercare — escalating to engineering only when platform-level changes are required 

Client Engagement & Delivery 

• Act as the day-to-day client contact for all design, configuration, and adoption activities — building trusted working relationships with engineering lead