Forward Deployed Engineer

Generalist • San Mateo, CA

3d

About The Position

Generalist is building AI that enables robots to do useful work in the physical world. The Forward Deployed Engineer turns this technology into working customer deployments, owning engineering from understanding workflows and designing integrations to deploying software, debugging robot behavior, and helping customers get started. As one of Generalist’s first Forward Deployed Engineers, this person will deliver early deployments and help establish how the function scopes technical work, measures success, diagnoses failures, and turns customer learnings into reusable tools and practices. The role is hands-on and cross-functional, involving code, robot hardware, customer systems, and collaboration with research, engineering, operations, and partnerships teams. It requires moving between customer conversations, system design, and debugging, and remaining accountable until systems work in practice.

Requirements

• Experience building and shipping production software and independently taking ambiguous technical problems through to tested, working solutions.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing integrations across APIs, services, or complex systems.
• Ability to explain design choices and reason through failure modes.
• Methodical debugging skills: establish expected behavior, gather evidence, test hypotheses, and verify that fixes address underlying problems.
• Ability and interest in working directly with customers and users, translating needs into engineering work and clearly explaining complex issues without overpromising.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly, with curiosity about machine learning, robotics, and reliable real-world operation.
• Ownership and adaptability in an early-stage environment, including creating structure and balancing immediate customer needs with improvements for future deployments.
• Interest in hands-on work with robots and customer teams, including time at customer sites.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in robotics, machine learning, or deploying complex software in customer environments is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own technical delivery of customer deployments, from understanding requirements and defining success criteria through integration, software rollout, onboarding, live field debugging, and ongoing improvement.
• Design and build reliable, maintainable software integrations between Generalist’s systems and customer APIs, applications, and workflows.
• Design robot tasks and evaluation workflows, examine rollout data, and refine tasks when real-world performance falls short of expectations.
• Debug software, integrations, robot behavior, and operating environments using logs, observations, and focused experiments; implement fixes and verify results.
• Work directly with customers to understand constraints, explain technical tradeoffs, and communicate progress clearly; involve specialists when needed while retaining ownership of outcomes.
• Turn deployment experience into reusable tooling, documentation, diagnostics, and playbooks, and propose system improvements that make future deployments easier and more reliable.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed