- Location
- Santa Clara, CA
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Engineering
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Closing date
- Today
- Source
- ApplyToJob
Description
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.