Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Standard Bots
$215-275k
+ Equity and bonus
More information about location
5 days a week in office
AI-powered robots
Be an early applicant
AI-powered robots
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$215-275k
+ Equity and bonus
More information about location
5 days a week in office
21-100 employees
Company mission
To propel human productivity through the world’s most accessible robots.
Role
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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
In recent years, the field of robotics has brought to life ideas that once belonged to the world of sci-fi. But, robots are still extremely complex to program, making the automations they facilitate out of reach for many businesses.
Standard Bots is setting out to change this, with AI-powered robots and a complementary robotics platform that means they can be programmed through simple demonstrations. This approach should broaden the accessibility of robots to businesses of all sizes, enabling them to employ automations that can give them a competitive edge.
It's an intriguing proposition, and investors agree, with the company raising substantial funding to support its mission. Standard Bots plans to use these funds to expand its engineering team and speed up the development of its robots. The company will, however, likely need to contend with competition from inexpensive robots from China as it develops into the future.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jun 2026
$200m
SERIES C
Jul 2024
$63m
SERIES B
Total funding: $287m
Company benefits
- Employee stock options
- Paid time off
- Medical/dental/vision insurance
- Life insurance & disability insurance
- 401(k)
Company HQ
Glen Cove, NY
Leadership
Evan Beard
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Co-Founder and CEO at A Plus. Also co-founded Gridtech and Etacts, and was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in Software Engineering at Salesforce.
David Golden
(Co-Founder)Co-founder and Chairman at Miralinc Pharma, and Co-founder at Bowery Farming. Previously co-founded and was CEO at LeapPay, and has also worked in Investment at several businesses.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 17 more jobs at Standard Bots