Forward Deployed Engineer

The posting, as Generalist wrote it

ABOUT GENERALIST

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done.

We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world.

The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models (PaLM-E, https://research.google/blog/palm-e-an-embodied-multimodal-language-model/ RT-2 https://deepmind.google/blog/rt-2-new-model-translates-vision-and-language-into-action/, Gemini Robotics https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/), launched and scaled ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/ and GPT-4 https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-research/ to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots (Atlas https://bostondynamics.com/atlas/, Spot https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/, Stretch https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk to manipulation https://bostondynamics.com/blog/large-behavior-models-atlas-find-new-footing/, and testing robustness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuA50H9uek).

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Generalist is building AI that enables robots to do useful work in the physical world. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will turn that technology into working customer deployments, owning the engineering from understanding a workflow and designing an integration to deploying software, debugging robot behavior, and helping customers get started.

You will be one of Generalist’s first Forward Deployed Engineers and help build the foundation of the function. Alongside delivering our earliest deployments, you will shape how we scope technical work, measure success, diagnose failures, and turn what we learn at one customer into tools and practices the whole team can use.

This is a hands-on cross-functional engineering role. You will write and ship code, work directly with robot hardware and customer systems, and collaborate closely with our research, engineering, operations, and partnerships teams. You should enjoy moving between a customer conversation, a system desi
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oftware, 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.

YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU

• 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. You can explain your design choices and reason through failure modes.
• 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.