Staff Backend Engineer, Forward Deployed

Foxglove • San Francisco, CA

120d

About The Position

We are looking for an experienced and highly adaptable Forward-Deployed Engineer to join our team at Foxglove. This role is ideal for a product-minded full-stack engineer who thrives in customer-facing environments and enjoys solving complex technical challenges in robotics and observability. As a Forward-Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with strategic customers to integrate and extend Foxglove's platform within their environments, while also contributing upstream to our core product. This position offers a unique mix of hands-on development, creative problem-solving, and close collaboration with customer teams. You'll act as a trusted engineering partner, ensuring Foxglove is seamlessly woven into customer workflows and identifying opportunities to drive improvements based on real-world use cases.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience in Python, C++, ROS, and Node.js
• 3+ years of professional experience in Robotics or Autonomous systems
• Experience in customer-facing engineering roles, ideally with robotics or autonomy exposure.
• Proven history of rapid prototyping and iterative delivery with external stakeholders.
• Solid grasp of network and cloud architecture (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and database-backed REST APIs.
• Comfortable owning problems end-to-end, learning what’s missing, and communicating technical details to any audience.
• Willingness to travel extensively and work on-site with customers when required.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with multiple database systems
• Experience designing SDKs, integration libraries, or internal tooling that reduced services cycle time.

Responsibilities

• Embed deeply with customer teams to understand business goals, domain constraints, and technical requirements.
• Architect and build end-to-end solutions with an experiment-driven, iterative approach (TypeScript/React, Node.js, Python, ROS, SQL).
• Draft clear scopes of work, timelines, and success metrics for proofs-of-concept through production roll-outs.
• Code side-by-side with customer engineers, deploying on their cloud or on-prem environments to ensure successful adoption.
• Partner closely with Sales and Customer Success on the same accounts to guarantee seamless experiences and measurable outcomes.
• Relay frontline insights to Research, Product, and Engineering; your learnings shape our roadmap.
• Document best practices, contribute to internal libraries, and mentor future FDEs so the function scales efficiently.

Benefits

• Competitive equity grant in a Series A company
• Medical insurance coverage at 90% for employees and 75% for dependents
• 401k matching up to 4%
• 4 weeks vacation, plus holidays and winter break
• All expenses paid company off-sites 2x/year

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level