Forward Deployed Engineer: Turn Lab Data Into Product

Breakout Ventures; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Lunch subsidy

Job summary

Transfyr, Cambridge, MA, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with scientists and partners, translating messy scientific data into actionable insights. You will collaborate with Field Application Engineers to ensure the full system delivers valuable results across protocols, experiments, and deployments.

The role demands wet-lab fluency, strong engineering ability to prototype, and a bias toward learning from users. Early-career builders with ownership mindset are encouraged to apply.

Qualifications

• Meaningful hands-on experience in a wet lab or another complex scientific environment, with an understanding of protocols, experimental variability, and how work changes outside ideal conditions.
• Ability to write useful code, ideally in Python, and work with APIs, data pipelines, analysis tools, or simple product interfaces well enough to test ideas quickly.
• Experience learning from users, separating stated requests from underlying needs, and turning field evidence into a clear product or technical direction.
• Comfort working with messy, multimodal, or time-series data and connecting observations to experimental context and outcomes.
• Ability to see how science, software, models, sensors, operations, and human behavior interact in a deployment.
• A record of managing dependencies, communicating risks, and delivering useful outcomes in an environment with changing constraints.
• Strong fundamentals, curiosity, and the ability to pick up unfamiliar scientific and technical domains quickly.

Responsibilities

• Learn the real workflow: Embed with scientists to understand experimental intent, execution, exceptions, failure modes, and tacit knowledge that never appears in the written protocol.
• Make science legible: Turn observation, interviews, sensor data, metadata, and experimental outcomes into structured representations of how work is actually performed.
• Design the right first solution: Build conviction about the customer problem before overbuilding. Define hypotheses, identify the smallest useful intervention, and test it quickly.
• Prototype in the field: Write code, analyze data, configure tools, and create lightweight product workflows that solve an immediate user problem and teach us what the platform should become.
• Support technical transfer: Help partners move protocols between experts, new operators, and sites while capturing contextual changes, deviations, and sources of variability.
• Translate field insight into product: Convert customer observations into clear requirements and priorities for software, perception, AI/ML, hardware, and scientific teams.
• Deliver customer value: Own whether a deployment produces useful scientific and operational outcomes, not merely whether the technology was installed.
• Build the FDE playbook: Create reusable methods, tools, and artifacts that make each deployment faster, more reliable, and more scalable than the last.
• Lay the groundwork for automation: Help turn execution-level data and expert judgment into troubleshooting agents, training systems, and future physical AI capabilities.

Skills

Scientific workflows

Technical prototyping

Product discovery

Data reasoning

Cross-functional systems thinking

Project ownership

Learning velocity

Tools

APIs

Data pipelines

Python

Hardware

Networking

Job description

Transfyr, Cambridge, MA, is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with scientists and partners, translating messy scientific data into actionable insights. You will collaborate with Field Application Engineers to ensure the full system delivers valuable results across protocols, experiments, and deployments.

The role demands wet-lab fluency, strong engineering ability to prototype, and a bias toward learning from users. Early-career builders with ownership mindset are encouraged to apply.