Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

xdof, Inc.; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

xdof, Inc. is seeking a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to drive customer success by embedding with strategic customers. This role requires ownership of project delivery, from translating technical needs to ensuring implementation meets performance standards.

The ideal candidate will have at least 5 years of engineering experience, preferably in customer-facing or forward-deployed roles, with strong coding skills in Python.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering experience, ideally in customer-facing roles.
• History of ownership in technical projects without predetermined playbooks.
• Strong production coding experience, particularly with Python.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end delivery for strategic customers.
• Act as the first technical responder for client accounts.
• Close the loop on customer needs to inform pipeline roadmaps.

Skills

Engineering experience

Client-facing experience

Production coding (Python)

Strong problem-solving skills

Communication skills

Job description

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 highest-quality teleoperation, on-embodiment, and egocentric data 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 escape 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.