Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

Job description

**About XDOF** XDOF is the data engine for embodied intelligence. We help the world's leading robotics and foundation-model labs unlock general-purpose robots by delivering the highest-quality teleoperation, on-embodiment, and egocentric data and paired with our own hardware ecosystem and a model fine-tuning loop that closes the loop on data quality. We recently emerged from stealth and are scaling our customer base of frontier AI and humanoid companies quickly. **About the role** We're hiring our founding Forward Deployed Engineers. You'll embed with our most strategic customers and own their success end-to-end, from translating their model and data needs into concrete collection / annotation / delivery specs, to making sure the data we ship actually moves their model performance. This is a critical role that today, our founders and core engineers absorb directly. As an FDE, you'll be the single technical owner for a portfolio of accounts, sitting at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, and you'll help define our forward-deployed motion as we grow. **What you'll do** - **Own end-to-end delivery** for a set of strategic customers: scope requirements, sequence delivery, QA before shipping, and clear blockers. - **Be the first technical responder** for your accounts: triage questions, manage expectations on timelines and on still-maturing data products, and escalate only what genuinely needs it. - **Represent XDOF's technical depth** to sophisticated customers while protecting proprietary methodology - **Close the loop:** turn recurring customer needs and delivery pain into concrete input for our data-engine, pipeline, and annotation roadmaps, and codify what works into reusable playbooks. - **Grow the motion:** as the role matures, lead platform-integration engagements and model fine-tuning / evaluation services for enterprise customers. **What we're looking for** - **5+ years of engineering experience**, ideally including customer-facing or forward-deployed work. - **Founding-engineer profile, strongly preferred:** you've owned many things at once and solved hard problems without a playbook, and you want to talk to customers. - **Strong production coding** (Python preferred), with real experience shipping and operating data pipelines or infrastructure. - **High agency and comfort with ambiguity:** you drive customer outcomes rather than wait for a spec. - **Excellent communication and low ego:** you can run discovery, push back respectfully on unrealistic asks, and explain hard tradeoffs to both engineers and executives. **Nice to have** - Background in robotics, embodied AI, autonomy, or ML data infrastructure. - Familiarity with robot-learning data (teleoperation, egocentric, VLA / robot foundation models) and formats like MCAP, HDF5, etc. - Forward-deployed or solutions experience at an enterprise or frontier-AI company.