Forward Deployed Engineer

Generalist • San Mateo, CA

4d • $150,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Generalist is building AI that enables robots to perform 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 through 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 the function. They will shape how the team scopes technical work, measures success, diagnoses failures, and turns lessons from customer deployments into reusable tools and practices.

This is a hands-on, cross-functional engineering role involving code, robot hardware, and customer systems. The engineer will work closely with research, engineering, operations, and partnerships teams, moving between customer conversations, system design, and debugging while remaining accountable for practical results.

Requirements

• Experience building and shipping production software and independently taking technical problems from ambiguous requirements 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, including gathering evidence, testing hypotheses, and verifying that fixes address underlying problems.
• Ability to work directly with customers and users, ask effective questions, translate needs into engineering work, and clearly explain complex issues without overpromising.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and curiosity about machine learning, robotics, and reliable real-world operation.
• Ownership and ability to create structure in an early-stage environment while balancing immediate customer needs with improvements for future deployments.
• Willingness and enthusiasm to work hands-on with robots and customer teams, including time at customer sites.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in robotics.
• Experience in machine learning.
• Experience deploying complex software in customer environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the 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 connecting Generalist’s systems with 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; isolate problems, 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 the outcome.
• Turn deployment experience into reusable tooling, documentation, diagnostics, playbooks, and proposed system improvements that make future deployments easier and more reliable.

What This Job Offers

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