Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) – Robotics / Embodied AI

About the Opportunity We are partnering with a fast-growing robotics and embodied AI startup to hire a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE). This is a high-impact, customer-facing engineering role focused on bridging cutting-edge AI research, robotics data infrastructure, and real-world customer deployments. As an early member of the team, you will work directly with leading robotics and AI research organizations, own technical customer engagements end-to-end, and help build scalable solutions that accelerate the development of next-generation intelligent robots.

Key Responsibilities

• Own End-to-End Technical Delivery: Lead customer engagements from requirements gathering and technical scoping through implementation, validation, and delivery.
• Serve as a Technical Partner: Work directly with customers to understand their robotics, AI model training, and data infrastructure needs, troubleshoot issues, and drive successful outcomes.
• Build and Improve Data Infrastructure: Develop and optimize data pipelines, integrations, and workflows supporting large-scale robotics and multimodal AI datasets.
• Drive Product Improvements: Translate customer feedback and technical challenges into actionable improvements for internal engineering and platform teams.
• Develop Scalable Solutions: Build reusable tools, automation, and technical processes to improve delivery efficiency and customer experience.
• Support Future AI Capabilities: Contribute to platform integrations, model fine-tuning, and evaluation workflows as the company scales.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in backend engineering, data infrastructure, or customer-facing technical roles.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with hands-on experience building and maintaining production systems.
• Experience developing data pipelines, backend infrastructure, APIs, or distributed systems.
• Ability to work directly with technical customers, translate ambiguous requirements into solutions, and independently drive projects.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment with significant ownership and ambiguity.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in robotics, embodied AI, autonomous systems, or machine learning infrastructure.
• Familiarity with multimodal datasets, robot learning, teleoperation, or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
• Experience with robotics data formats such as MCAP or HDF5.
• Previous experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Founding Engineer, or Technical Lead.
• Exposure to AI model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or large-scale data processing.

Why Join?

• Join an early-stage team building infrastructure for the next generation of robotics and embodied AI.
• Work closely with leading AI and robotics research organizations.
• Take ownership of high-impact technical projects with direct customer exposure.
• Help shape the company's engineering practices, customer integration strategy, and future platform capabilities.