Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

## About Standard Bots Standard Bot's mission is to significantly lower the barrier to entry to real-world automation, bringing the power of bits to the world of atoms and unlocking productivity for entire new industries and users. Our user-facing applications and APIs directly empower individuals and developers to jump directly into solving their challenges without the need for a background in robotics or automation. A relentless focus on simplicity and ease of use brings this revolutionary potential to new users and industries. ## The Opportunity: Forward Deployed With a Large Robotics API Customer We are looking for an exceptional Staff Software Engineer to work on site with one of our largest customers. That customer is an AI robotics company that drives our arms from its own models through our streaming APIs and SDK. You join our SDK and external APIs team and build on our platform. For the first nine to twelve months, you spend most of your week at the customer's facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. Your impact will be measured not just by fixing their problem but building production level fixes that make it into our product. It will also be measured by how much of what you learn on site shapes the platform for all developers who build on our APIs. ## What You'll Do ### Strategic Architecture & Long-Term Vision - **Define the Future:** Own the technical vision for how advanced customers drive our robots programmatically: realtime streaming control, the Python SDK, ROS 2 integration, and the safety limits that make streamed motion trustworthy across a fleet. - **Decouple and Scale:** Generalize what you learn on site into product capabilities with clear, stable interfaces. Each fix and feature you ship should be brought back to the team to bring into the product for all developers. You keep that standard through all one-off solutions. - **Standard Setter:** Set the bar for the reliability, safety, and observability of our external control surface. Failure modes found in the field then become tested guarantees in the platform. ### Complex Project Leadership & Execution - **Represent the Customer Inside Engineering:** Be the customer's technical point of contact and the team's eyes on their floor. Convert what you see into prioritized, testable requirements. Hold the line when a request takes the product somewhere unsafe or off the roadmap. - **Pragmatic Trade-Offs:** Decide clearly between the fast fix the customer needs this week and the durable change the platform needs. Put those decisions in writing for both sides. - **Hands-on Delivery:** Ship fixes and features across our stack, from TypeScript/Node services and our Python SDK to a ROS 2 adapter and the robot controller. Take each one from a first reproduction at the customer's cell to a release-gated change in the product. ### Production Excellence & Organizational Leverage - **Systemic Reliability:** Root-cause the hard problems on site: realtime streaming faults, networking and environment issues, safety stops, and collision behavior. Turn each one into fixes, tests, and runbooks that prevent recurrence across the customer’s fleet. - **Technical Multiplier:** Pair with the customer's engineers to help them diagnose and integrate more on their own. Bring what you learn back to the team, and everyone builds with the customer's reality in view. - **Influence & Accountability:** Run the weekly working session with the customer's engineers and contribute to the monthly roadmap review with their leadership. Priorities then live in one place, and progress is visible to both companies. ## Who You Are We are looking for a technically deep, product-minded engineer who wants to see their work run in a customer's facility every day. You are direct and tactful with customers, hard to push into shortcuts, and quick to ramp on a large existing codebase. You want to spend most of your week at a customer site. ## Skills You'll Bring - **Experience:** 8+ years of professional software engineering, including ownership of a technical problem space end to end and leadership of complex work across teams. Time as a forward deployed, solutions, or customer-embedded engineer is a strong plus. Experience with a technical customer that runs its own engineering team matters more than the title you held. - **Debugging Depth:** You root-cause across a distributed system: Linux, containers, networking, logs, and timing, often on hardware you did not build and with incomplete information. - **Customer Judgment:** You have worked directly with demanding technical customers. You know how to decline a request and offer the roadmap path instead, and you handle sensitive product information with care. - **Clarity of Communication:** You write requirements, incident write-ups, and decisions that a customer's ML engineer and our leadership can both act on. - **Tech Stack Expertise:** Fluency in Python and TypeScript/Node.js, with range across the rest of our stack (React, C++, Kubernetes). Working knowledge of ROS 2 is preferred. - **Robotics and Realtime Control is a plus:** Hands-on experience with robot control interfaces such as ROS 2, streaming or trajectory APIs, or motion control at 100 Hz and above. Familiarity with safety stops and collision handling is a plus. ## Location and Benefits This role is on site at our customer's facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, five days a week, for the first nine to twelve months. You start with about a month of onboarding with the team, followed by at least two weeks in our New York City office. After that, you return to New York for a week every one to two months. When the on-site engagement ends, the role continues on the SDK and external APIs team. ### Office & Workplace Perks When you are in New York, you work from our office near Grand Central Station: - **Direct Access to Robotics:** Work alongside our physical products with dedicated demo and testing cells, allowing you to validate your work on real robots daily. - **Collaborative & Modern Space:** Enjoy open collaborative spaces for team problem-solving and focus zones for deep work. - **Customizable Workstations:** We provide ergonomic and customizable setups to ensure a comfortable and productive work environment. - **Amenities:** Daily catered lunch, fully stocked kitchens with snacks and beverages, and regular team events. ## Compensation The base salary range for this role is $215,000 to $275,000, depending on experience. Base salary is just one part of the overall compensation at Standard Bots. All Full-Time Employees are eligible for Employee Stock Options. We also offer a package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and 401(k) to regular full-time employees.