Forward Deployed Engineer

Generalist • Somerville, MA

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 work from understanding workflows and designing integrations through software deployment, robot-behavior debugging, and customer onboarding. 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 experience into reusable tools and practices.

This is a hands-on, cross-functional engineering role involving writing and shipping code, working directly with robot hardware and customer systems, and collaborating with research, engineering, operations, and partnerships teams. The role 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 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 and interest in working directly with customers and users, translating needs into engineering work, and clearly explaining complex issues without overpromising system capabilities.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and curiosity about machine learning, robotics, and reliable real-world operation.
• Ownership and initiative in an early-stage environment, including creating structure and 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, machine learning, or deploying complex software in customer environments.

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 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; implement fixes and verify results.
• Work directly with customers to understand constraints, explain technical tradeoffs, and communicate progress clearly; bring in specialists when needed while retaining ownership of the outcome.
• Turn deployment experience into reusable tooling, documentation, diagnostics, playbooks, and proposed system improvements to make future deployments easier and more reliable.

What This Job Offers

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