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Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
Full time
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San Mateo, CA | Onsite
5 - 8 Years of Experience
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Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
Location
San Mateo, CA
Fully onsite, 5 days per week, Monday–Friday.
Company Stage of Funding
Series A
The company has raised $70 million in Series A funding, backed by leading venture investors. Revenue is strong and growing quickly.
Office Type
On-site — 5 days per week
Salary
$230,000–$310,000 Base
Equity
Competitive Equity
Visa
Open to visa transfers, including H-1B and OPT transfers.
Employment Type
Full-time
Company Description
This venture-backed company is building the data engine for physical AI, delivering high-quality teleoperation and robotics training data to frontier AI labs and leading humanoid robotics companies worldwide.
The company has raised $70 million in Series A funding from prominent investors, including Thrive, Andreessen Horowitz, and Spark Capital. Its founders have backgrounds in Berkeley robotics research and experience at leading robotics companies. With strong, growing revenue and increasing demand from major customers, the company is scaling its customer delivery and engineering capabilities.
The company is looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to own end-to-end technical delivery for its most strategic enterprise customers in the robotics and frontier AI space. This is a founding FDE role, offering the opportunity to establish the forward-deployed engineering function and shape how the company serves its largest accounts.
The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering skills with excellent customer communication. They should be able to understand complex technical systems, independently troubleshoot customer issues, manage data delivery, and translate technical concepts into clear, actionable explanations.
This is not a traditional sales engineering role. The company needs a hands-on engineer who can write production-quality code, solve technical problems independently, and build trust with sophisticated robotics and AI customers.
What You Will Do
- Own End-to-End Customer Delivery
Own technical delivery for a portfolio of strategic customers, including leading robotics companies and frontier AI organizations.
Understand the complete data pipeline, from customer requirements and data collection through quality assurance and final delivery.
Scope customer requirements and translate them into concrete technical execution plans.
Ensure data quality and verify deliverables before they are shipped to customers.
Identify delivery blockers, troubleshoot issues, and drive resolution independently.
Coordinate across internal teams to ensure customer requirements are understood and delivery commitments are met.
Take responsibility for the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of customer deliverables.
Build a deep understanding of each customer's technical requirements and how delivered data affects their model performance.
Manage multiple customer engagements while maintaining high standards of delivery and communication.
- Troubleshoot Technical Customer Issues
Serve as the first technical point of contact for assigned customer accounts.
Triage customer questions, investigate technical issues, and resolve most problems without escalating to other engineers.
Use strong coding and debugging skills to identify root causes and implement practical solutions.
Understand the underlying data pipeline and related technical systems well enough to diagnose issues end-to-end.
Communicate technical limitations, delivery risks, and timelines clearly to customers.
Set realistic expectations and proactively communicate when an issue may affect delivery.
Distinguish between issues that can be resolved independently and those requiring additional engineering support.
Develop a structured approach to recurring customer issues, reducing repeated troubleshooting effort.
Maintain customer confidence through timely responses, clear explanations, and reliable execution.
- Work Directly With Robotics & Frontier AI Customers
Build trusted technical relationships with sophisticated customers in the robotics and AI ecosystem.
Represent the company's technical capabilities in customer conversations and implementation discussions.
Translate complex technical concepts into language that customers can understand and act on.
Understand how customer requirements connect to robotics workflows, AI model development, and training data quality.
Gather technical feedback and clarify requirements before committing to implementation or delivery timelines.
Collaborate with customer engineering teams to resolve integration and data-related challenges.
Proactively identify risks, communicate tradeoffs, and ensure customers feel informed and supported.
Balance technical depth with customer empathy and strong relationship management.
Help customers understand how the delivered data supports their broader AI and robotics objectives.
- Improve Data Pipelines & Delivery Processes
Identify recurring customer issues, operational bottlenecks, and data delivery pain points.
Turn customer feedback into concrete improvements to internal tools, software, and data pipelines.
Write code to automate repetitive work and improve delivery reliability.
Develop reusable solutions and playbooks for common technical and customer-facing scenarios.
Improve data validation, quality assurance, and pre-delivery checks.
Work with engineering and operations teams to make delivery processes more scalable.
Document solutions and establish repeatable practices that reduce dependence on individual engineers.
Identify opportunities to improve the reliability, efficiency, and consistency of customer delivery.
Use hands-on engineering to solve immediate customer problems while contributing to long-term platform improvements.
- Build the Forward-Deployed Engineering Function
Help define the company's forward-deployed engineering approach from the ground up.
Establish repeatable processes for customer onboarding, technical delivery, troubleshooting, and account support.
Develop playbooks for common customer requirements, integration challenges, and delivery workflows.
Help determine how technical ownership should be structured across strategic accounts.
As the role evolves, lead platform-integration engagements for enterprise customers.
Support the development of model fine-tuning and evaluation services for enterprise customers.
Identify patterns across customer engagements and translate them into scalable engineering capabilities.
Work in a high-ownership environment where processes are still being established.
Help shape the future of the forward-deployed team as customer demand grows.
Ideal Candidate Background
Experience Requirements
Typically 5–8 years of experience as a customer-facing Software Engineer or Forward Deployed Engineer.
Strong candidates with 3+ years of experience at highly technical companies such as Palantir or Snowflake may also be considered.
Experience in customer-facing engineering at a highly technical enterprise or S-tier technology company is a dealbreaker requirement.
Demonstrated ability to combine hands-on software engineering with direct customer engagement.
Experience independently troubleshooting and resolving technical customer issues.
Experience working with sophisticated technical customers and complex product requirements.
Strong production coding and problem-solving skills.
Experience taking ownership of technical delivery from scoping through implementation and resolution.
Founding engineer or startup founder experience is a plus.
Robotics or embodied AI experience is a plus.
Ability to work fully onsite in San Mateo, CA, 5 days per week.
Technical Requirements
Strong software engineering fundamentals and production coding ability.
Python preferred.
Ability to independently debug, troubleshoot, and resolve technical issues.
Experience understanding and working across data pipelines.
Ability to scope technical requirements and translate them into practical implementations.
Strong problem-solving skills when dealing with ambiguous technical issues.
Ability to understand complex technical systems and identify root causes.
Experience building or maintaining reliable software used in customer-facing environments.
Ability to improve existing workflows through code, automation, and re