Robotics Deployment Engineer: Hands-On, Customer-Facing

Generalist AI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Generalist is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to translate AI and robotics advancements into practical customer deployments. You will own engineering from workflow understanding to deploying software, debugging robot behavior, and helping customers get started.

As one of the first in this role, you will shape how we scope technical work, measure success, diagnose failures, and turn learnings into scalable tooling and practices for the team.

Qualifications

• Have built and shipped production software and can independently take a technical problem from an ambiguous requirement to a tested, working solution.
• Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing integrations across APIs, services, or complex systems.
• Debug methodically: establish what should happen, gather evidence about what actually happened, test hypotheses, and check that a fix addresses the underlying problem.
• Enjoy working directly with customers and users. You ask good questions, translate their needs into engineering work, and explain complex issues clearly without making promises the system cannot support.
• Learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and are curious about machine learning, robotics, and the gap between a successful demonstration and reliable operation.
• Take ownership in an early-stage environment, create structure where it is missing, and balance immediate customer needs with improvements that will serve future deployments.
• Are excited to work hands-on with robots and customer teams, including time at customer sites.
• Experience in robotics, machine learning, or deploying complex software in customer environments is a plus. Strong software engineers who are eager to learn robotics are encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

• Owning the technical delivery of customer deployments, from understanding requirements and defining success criteria through integration, software rollout, onboarding, live debugging in the field, and ongoing improvement.
• Designing and building software integrations that connect Generalist’s systems with customer APIs, applications, and workflows, with attention to reliability and maintainability.
• Designing robot tasks and evaluation workflows, examining rollout data, and refining tasks when performance in the real world falls short of expectations.
• Debugging across software, integrations, robot behavior, and the operating environment. Use logs, observations, and focused experiments to isolate problems, implement fixes, and verify results.
• Working directly with customers to understand constraints, explain technical tradeoffs, and communicate progress clearly. Bring in the right specialists when needed while retaining ownership of the outcome.
• Turning deployment experience into reusable tooling, documentation, diagnostics, and playbooks, and proposed system improvements that make each subsequent deployment easier and more reliable.

Job description

Generalist is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to translate AI and robotics advancements into practical customer deployments. You will own engineering from workflow understanding to deploying software, debugging robot behavior, and helping customers get started.

As one of the first in this role, you will shape how we scope technical work, measure success, diagnose failures, and turn learnings into scalable tooling and practices for the team.