Early-stage startup supplying training data and teleoperation tooling to frontier robotics and AI teams.

Forward Deployed Engineer

San FranciscoOn-site$230K - $310K5 - 8 yearsReferral bonus eligible
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One day you're standing in a customer's robot lab, wiring up a teleoperation rig and coaching an operator through a manipulation task; the next you're back at your keyboard, writing Python to scrub, validate, and package the resulting demonstration data so a research team can actually train on it. You'll be our technical presence in the field: installing and debugging collection setups on customer hardware, chasing down data-quality issues at the source, and translating a researcher's half-formed request into a concrete, well-labeled dataset. This is hands-on work at the seam between machine learning and physical robots, and you'll feel every bug in your hands as well as see it in the logs.

What they're looking for

  • 5+ years in software engineering, with strong Python and a track record of shipping in messy, real-world conditions
  • Comfortable working directly with customers on site; you can run a debugging conversation as smoothly as a terminal session
  • Working knowledge of robotics, computer vision, or ML data pipelines; experience with teleoperation or embodied-AI datasets is a strong plus
  • Willing to be based full-time in San Francisco and travel occasionally to customer facilities
  • Practical hardware instincts — you can cable, mount, and troubleshoot physical systems without waiting for help

Tech stack

Python

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This role is one we're recruiting for on behalf of a client company; the client's identity is kept confidential at this stage. A Fluency recruiter will follow up with details.

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