Robotics Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

**The Company** Tutor Intelligence is building the technology and processes to let robots go where they’ve never gone before: the average American factory and warehouse. We understand that general-purpose and generally intelligent robots are going to be built in our lifetimes, and we’re not content to sit on the sidelines. Founded by MIT alumni and backed with over $40M in funding by leading investors in AI and robotics, Tutor combines human and artificial intelligence to build something greater than the sum of its parts — a Tutor Intelligence. As an AI software company that deploys its inventions directly into the facilities that need them, every line of code, process change, and decision at Tutor has a direct impact on the physical economy. **The Role** We're looking for a technically credible, customer-oriented engineer to own a portfolio of customer sites running Tutor robots in production. You'll be the primary partner for each of your sites — the person their operations, engineering, and maintenance teams call first when something matters — and you'll be accountable for the operational and technical success of those deployments over time. This isn't a traditional customer success role, and it isn't core product engineering. You won't own the product roadmap or build new robotic capabilities — that's R&D. But you *will* write code: the scripts, tooling, dashboards, and playbook logic that turn today's manual interventions into things that run themselves. The point of the job is to make your sites need you less over time, and to solve the hard, multi-factor problems that no playbook covers yet. You'll develop deep working knowledge of how our robots actually behave in the real world, diagnose issues across software, mechanical, and process dimensions, and partner with engineering to drive the deeper fixes — bringing the field context, prioritization, and validation that makes those fixes right. The role is also genuinely relationship-driven. The customers in your portfolio will know you, trust you, and rely on you. You'll spend real time on-site at your facilities, remote time on diagnosis, tuning, and building, and ongoing time partnering with your customers' engineering and operations leaders. Your insights from the field will directly shape our product roadmap. This role sits at the intersection of robotics, operations, and customer partnership — and the right person is energized by all three. ### Responsibilities - Own a portfolio of customer sites end-to-end: be the primary technical partner for each, build deep trust with their operations, engineering, and maintenance teams, and be accountable for the operational and technical success of those deployments. - **Automate yourself out of the repetitive work.** Convert recurring manual interventions into tooling, scripts, and playbooks that your customers and our remote team can run without you. The fleet grows; your manual workload shouldn't. This is the core of the job, not a side effect. - Develop deep working knowledge of our robot systems — software, hardware, and operational characteristics — sufficient to diagnose issues credibly and build real solutions at the boundary of the product. - Diagnose and resolve ambiguous, multi-factor issues in real-world environments — across software configuration, mechanical adjustment, process change, and root-cause analysis — and own the ones with no playbook yet. - Partner with engineering on the deeper fixes: package high-confidence cases with repro conditions, logs, and a likely root cause, and bring field validation rather than just a complaint. - Track the health and performance of your fleet — uptime, reliability, throughput, customer satisfaction — and act proactively on early signals. - Be the voice of your customers in our internal roadmap conversations; translate field reality into structured product insight. - Partner with Account Executives on expansion conversations, where operational success creates natural openings for growth. ### Requirements You clear a real technical floor, and then we select hard on judgment and people skills. Both halves matter; the second is what we weight most. *The technical floor (pass/fail):* - 3–7+ years in a technical, ideally customer-facing role: applications/field engineering, robotics deployment, solutions engineering, technical account management, or similar. - Technical depth in at least one of: robotics, industrial automation, controls, mechatronics, manufacturing systems, or warehouse/logistics technology. - Comfortable working hands-on with both software and physical systems in messy operational environments. You can read logs and telemetry, reason about a system you didn't build, and write the scripts/tooling to automate a manual process — you don't need to have built the robot from scratch. *What we actually rank on:* - **Thrives in ambiguity** — can take a vague, half-described, multi-factor problem with no clear owner and drive it to resolution. This is the single quality we weight most heavily. - Strong judgment about what to fix yourself, what to automate, and what to escalate. - Genuine relationship orientation — you take pride in being trusted by a customer over years, not just in shipping a project. - Clear communication in both directions: technically credible with customer engineering and ops teams, and plain-spoken with non-technical operators and leaders. *The reality of the job:* - Roughly 30% travel to customer sites. The work happens on factory and warehouse floors — early shifts, PPE, noise, and real industrial environments. If that energizes you, great; if it doesn't, this isn't the role. ### Nice to haves (zero or more) - Direct experience deploying or supporting robotics in production. - Background in warehouse, manufacturing, or other industrial operations. - Experience bringing field context into engineering decisions to resolve technical issues. - Deep interest in robotics, automation, or the future of physical AI. ### Why This Role Is Unique - Work at the intersection of cutting-edge robotics and real-world industrial operations. - Own the success of real customers running real robots in production — your work directly determines whether the future of physical AI happens in their facility. - Join during a period of rapid growth, where this function is central to scaling the fleet. - Help define what this function looks like at Tutor — you'll be among the people who build the tooling and playbooks that later hires inherit.