Forward Deployed Engineer

Dexterity • Redwood City, CA

138d • $130,000 - $170,000

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer you are the front line leading Dexterity's robots into new opportunities. You will work to bridge any gaps between Dexterity's standard product and the particular challenges of new customer engagements or new market segments. Your mission is to bring new applications online in the field and demonstrate all the operational metrics necessary to rapidly unlock fleet-wide scaling at each new customer opportunity. This role is ideal for engineers with a passion for developing robotic solutions that operate in the real world at scale. This role requires broad, systems level understanding of the full robotic tech stack, both software and hardware. You will be expected to do system level performance analysis and drive system level solutions through hands on engineering, partnering with other teams across Dexterity, third party partners and the customer.

Requirements

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Robotics or a related discipline, or relevant experience.
• Proficient in Python or C++, with experience implementing a large project or product feature.
• Aptitude for Hands-On Work in Physical-AI Environments — must be willing work across the full breadth of the robot stack from sensors to software.
• Data-driven Mindset, ability to instrument, query, and visualize telemetry to inform decisions.
• Familiarity with support tools and observability platforms (e.g., Grafana, Kibana, Foxglove, ArgoCD).
• Strong analytical and debugging skills; experience parsing logs and telemetry data.
• Clear Communication — translate technical findings into customer-friendly language and crisp bug reports.
• Self-starter mindset with a willingness to take ownership in ambiguous environments.
• Bias for Action — sense of urgency in production environments; willingness to 'own the ticket' until closure.

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting AI/ML inference platforms (model drift, retraining pipelines).
• System-level Troubleshooting across Linux, networking (TCP/IP, VLANs, VPNs), containers (Docker/K8s), and cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Familiarity with message queues & real-time data buses (RESTAPI).
• Exposure to industrial automation or warehouse management systems.
• Knowledge of CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) and feature-flag rollouts.
• Basic understanding of robot kinematics and perception pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Drive System Performance Improvement in the Field — Translate field operations experience into better systems, improved learning and enhanced robot skills to optimize top line performance as robot deployments scale.
• Diagnose & Resolve Incidents — Analyse logs, telemetry, SQL/NoSQL data, and container metrics to pinpoint failures; reproduce issues in staging; craft work-arounds or scripted hot-fixes; document in ticketing system (Jira/Zendesk).
• Proactive Monitoring — Tune alerting rules, dashboards, and anomaly-detection models; perform trend analysis to track system performance towards KPI targets.
• Field Presence — Embed on customer site during go-live, major upgrades, or chronic issue hunts.
• Knowledge & Automation — Write SOPs, runbooks, and self-service articles; contribute to CLI tools and diagnostic scripts in Python/Bash; mentor TAC on new failure modes.
• Continuous Improvement Projects — Partner with Product and Engineering on feature hardening, performance tuning, and reliability improvement.
• Own and execute NPI software commissioning at customer sites, including tooling setup, system testing, and calibration.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and equity package.
• Flexible PTO, and a culture committed to growth and inclusion.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees