Forward Deployed Engineer

4 days ago

San Francisco, CA, United States Formant Full time
About Formant

At Formant, we're building the operating system for intelligent machines. Our mission is to unlock the full potential of robotics by making it effortless to manage, operate, and scale heterogeneous fleets-powered by AI. Our customers span autonomous cleaning, logistics, agriculture, and more. We're a small, agile team working on a big, tangible future: real-world AI in motion.

The Role

NOTE- This role is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. You MUST be willing to relocate.

We're hiring our first Forward Deployed Engineer: a customer champion who brings AI capabilities into the messy, complex reality of production robotics environments. This isn't a role for someone who wants to perfect algorithms in isolation. You'll spend your time embedded with customers, understanding their operations, identifying where AI can transform their business, and building solutions that deliver measurable impact.

You'll be the bridge between our customers' operational challenges and our platform's AI capabilities. When a logistics company needs to predict maintenance issues across 200 robots, or an agriculture customer wants to optimize route planning with LLMs, you're the person who turns that business problem into a deployed solution.

You'll report to our Director, Customer Success Engineering and work closely with product engineering and go-to-market teams to ensure every customer deployment succeeds and that lessons learned improve our platform for everyone.

What You'll Do

Customer-First Deployment & Implementation

  • Own end-to-end AI implementations for enterprise customers ($500k+ ARR), from initial discovery through production deployment and beyond
  • Embed on-site with customers to deeply understand their robotics operations, workflow constraints, and business objectives
  • Transform ambiguous customer requirements (like "we need our robots to work better") into concrete, deployed AI solutions that drive measurable ROI
  • Build trust as the technical expert customers rely on during critical deployments and production issues
AI Solutions in Production Environments
  • Design and implement LLM-powered workflows, RAG pipelines, and AI solutions tailored to each customer's specific robotic use cases
  • Rapidly prototype solutions that balance cutting-edge AI capabilities with production reliability requirements
  • Navigate the real-world constraints of robotics deployments: latency, connectivity, safety, and integration with existing systems
  • Create reusable frameworks and tools that accelerate future customer deployments
Cross-Functional Impact
  • Serve as the voice of the customer to product engineering, translating field insights into platform improvements and new AI capabilities
  • Collaborate with go-to-market teams to demonstrate technical value in customer engagements and support expansion opportunities
  • Enable customer teams through training, documentation, and knowledge transfer, ensuring they can maintain and evolve AI solutions independently
  • Switch seamlessly between diving deep into technical architecture with customer engineers and presenting business value to C-suite executives
Who You Are

Required Experience
  • 3+ years in customer-facing engineering roles deploying technical solutions in production environments (Solutions Engineering, Implementation Engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering, Technical Account Management, etc.)
  • Proven enterprise customer success: Track record of managing customer engagements at companies with $500k+ ARR, including on-site deployments
  • Production deployment expertise: You've shipped real solutions that real users depend on and supported them when things break
  • Programming proficiency: Comfortable writing production-quality code in Python or TypeScript
  • AI/LLM experience: Hands-on experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and RAG/vector databases in production contexts
  • Ambiguity navigator: Demonstrated ability to take vague customer needs and turn them into concrete technical solutions
What Makes You Exceptional
  • Technical versatility with React, SQL, and ROS
  • Experience integrating external APIs to build end-to-end customer solutions
  • Familiarity with robotics platforms (Boston Dynamics Spot, AMRs, industrial robots, SCADA systems)
  • Knowledge of Model Context Protocol or similar AI frameworks
  • Background at an AI-first startup or in forward deployed engineering roles
Who Will Struggle in This Role
  • Pure research or academic backgrounds without production deployment experience
  • Inability or unwillingness to travel for customer engagements (expect 30-40% travel)
  • Preference for well-defined requirements over ambiguous problem spaces
  • Solo contributor mindset. This role requires extensive cross-functional collaboration
  • Discomfort with rapid context switching between technical depth and executive communication
Your Superpowers
  • Customer empathy: You genuinely care about customer success and take pride in their wins
  • Robotics passion: Excited by the intersection of AI and the physical world
  • Builder mentality: Bias toward shipping working prototypes over perfecting theoretical solutions
  • Communication range: Equally comfortable explaining architectures to executives and debugging with engineers
  • Fast learner: Quickly master new domains, from warehouse operations to agricultural workflows
  • Resilience: Thrive in the organized chaos of enterprise deployments and emergent customer needs


NOTE: This candidate will need to be located in the San Francisco area to occasionally go to the office to interact with our robots.

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