Forward Deployed Engineer (Physical AI)

AustinWorks; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

AustinWorks in San Francisco is seeking a hands-on software engineer to blend AI, product thinking, and direct customer work. You’ll partner with scientists and engineers in labs and manufacturing, uncover real problems, and build software to accelerate research, testing, and manufacturing.

You will lead projects from discovery through design, implementation, deployment, and iteration, translating ambiguous scientific needs into practical software requirements for real-world use.

Qualifications

• Approximately 1 to 5 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong software development and problem-solving fundamentals.
• Experience shipping production backend, full-stack, data, or AI systems.
• Practical familiarity with LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, multimodal AI, or machine learning.
• Strong communication skills and genuine interest in working directly with customers.
• Ability to operate independently without detailed requirements or structured tickets.
• Interest in physical industries, scientific research, robotics, hardware, or manufacturing.
• Willingness to work five days per week from the San Francisco office.
• Comfort traveling to customer facilities.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with scientists and engineers to understand complex R&D and manufacturing workflows.
• Translate ambiguous customer problems into clear technical solutions.
• Build AI agents, product features, integrations, internal tools, and data pipelines.
• Connect fragmented scientific data across lab systems, sensor logs, spreadsheets, reports, literature, and patents.
• Prototype quickly and iterate based on feedback from real users.
• Own deployments from initial discovery through production.
• Turn successful customer projects into reusable product capabilities.
• Partner closely with the founders and the ML, product, and infrastructure teams.
• Travel to customer sites when needed.

Skills

Software engineering

AI systems

Frontend/Backend

LLMs

Customer interaction

Independent working

Tools

Rust

AWS

Terraform

React

Next.js

Job description

Work model:

Full-time, five days per week in office

Compensation:

$150K to $200K base plus meaningful equity

The Company

My client is a 10-person, Greylock-backed AI startup building a scientific intelligence platform for the physical world.

They work with scientists and engineers across semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials, chemicals, aerospace, and manufacturing. These industries generate enormous amounts of valuable data, but it is often fragmented across spreadsheets, sensor logs, lab notebooks, reports, vendor documents, and experimental systems.

The company is building a unified intelligence layer for this information, powering specialized AI agents that help automate difficult workflows such as failure analysis, experimental design, and manufacturing optimization.

They have raised a $7M seed round from Greylock and other leading investors. The founders are Harvard computer science graduates with experience at SpaceX, Warp, and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The broader team includes engineers from Applied Intuition, Glean, Jane Street, Verkada, and Meta.

The Role

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who wants to combine software development, AI, product thinking, and direct customer work.

You will work firsthand with scientists and engineers in labs, R&D facilities, and manufacturing environments. You will learn how they operate, identify the real problem behind their requests, and build software that improves how physical technologies are researched, tested, and manufactured.

You will own projects from initial customer conversations through technical design, implementation, deployment, and iteration. Problems will often be ambiguous, and customers may not know how to translate their scientific needs into software requirements.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with scientists and engineers to understand complex R&D and manufacturing workflows
• Translate ambiguous customer problems into clear technical solutions
• Build AI agents, product features, integrations, internal tools, and data pipelines
• Connect fragmented scientific data across lab systems, sensor logs, spreadsheets, reports, literature, and patents
• Prototype quickly and iterate based on feedback from real users
• Own deployments from initial discovery through production
• Turn successful customer projects into reusable product capabilities
• Partner closely with the founders and the ML, product, and infrastructure teams
• Travel to customer sites when needed

Ideal Background

• Approximately 1 to 5 years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong software development and problem-solving fundamentals
• Experience shipping production backend, full-stack, data, or AI systems
• Practical familiarity with LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, multimodal AI, or machine learning
• Strong communication skills and genuine interest in working directly with customers
• Ability to operate independently without detailed requirements or structured tickets
• Interest in physical industries, scientific research, robotics, hardware, or manufacturing
• Willingness to work five days per week from the San Francisco office
• Comfort traveling to customer facilities

Strong candidates could come from:

• Forward deployed or customer-facing engineering
• Early-stage product or backend engineering
• Applied AI or machine learning engineering
• Robotics, autonomy, aerospace, semiconductors, batteries, or industrial software
• Technical founder or founding engineer backgrounds
• Computer science, electrical engineering, physics, materials science, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, or related disciplines

A traditional computer science background is not required. Candidates from physical science or engineering disciplines can be highly compelling if they have strong software-building experience.

Technology

The current stack includes:

• Rust
• AWS
• Terraform
• React
• Next.js
• Foundation models, AI agents, multimodal systems, retrieval, and scientific data integrations

Experience with every technology is not required. The company values engineers who learn quickly and choose the right tools for the problem.

Why Join

• Apply AI to difficult problems in science, engineering, and manufacturing
• Work directly with the people developing semiconductors, batteries, materials, and other frontier technologies
• Own meaningful customer and product outcomes from day one
• Help define the Forward Deployed Engineering function at a 10-person company
• Work with an exceptionally technical team backed by leading AI and venture investors
• Receive meaningful ownership at an early stage