Staff Backend Engineer, Forward Deployed

Robotics will have a massive positive impact on the world economy and global human productivity over the coming decade. At Foxglove, we're excited for this future, and we're building powerful open source and commercial tools to accelerate it.

We're an experienced team of independent thinkers, with a passion for creating high quality products. We're looking for self-motivated and fast-learning individuals to join our mission.
About the role

We are looking for an experienced and highly adaptable Forward-Deployed Engineer to join our team at Foxglove. This role is ideal for a product-minded full-stack engineer who thrives in customer-facing environments and enjoys solving complex technical challenges in robotics and observability.

As a Forward-Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with strategic customers to integrate and extend Foxglove's platform within their environments, while also contributing upstream to our core product. This position offers a unique mix of hands-on development, creative problem-solving, and close collaboration with customer teams. You'll act as a trusted engineering partner, ensuring Foxglove is seamlessly woven into customer workflows and identifying opportunities to drive improvements based on real-world use cases.

Location

Foxglove is a remote-friendly company, with employees spread across many locations. We maintain Pacific Time hours and hire within ±4 hours of U.S. time zones to ensure effective collaboration.

For this position, we're looking for someone located in the San Francisco Bay Area open to occasional travel to the Peninsula or South Bay.

Key Responsibilities

• Customer Collaboration - Embed deeply with customer teams to understand business goals, domain constraints, and technical requirements.
• Design & Development - Architect and build end-to-end solutions with an experiment-driven, iterative approach (TypeScript/React, Node.js, Python, ROS, SQL).
• Scoping & Planning - Draft clear scopes of work, timelines, and success metrics for proofs-of-concept through production roll-outs.
• Hands-On Delivery - Code side-by-side with customer engineers, deploying on their cloud or on-prem environments to ensure successful adoption.
• Cross-Functional Alignment - Partner closely with Sales and Customer Success on the same accounts to guarantee seamless experiences and measurable outcomes.
• Product Feedback Loop - Relay frontline insights to Research, Product, and Engineering; your learnings shape our roadmap.
• Internal Enablement - Document best practices, contribute to internal libraries, and mentor future FDEs so the function scales efficiently.

• 5+ years of professional experience in Python, C++, ROS, and Node.js
• 3+ years of professional experience in Robotics or Autonomous systems
• Experience in customer-facing engineering roles, ideally with robotics or autonomy exposure.
• Proven history of rapid prototyping and iterative delivery with external stakeholders.
• Solid grasp of network and cloud architecture (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and database-backed REST APIs.
• Comfortable owning problems end-to-end, learning what's missing, and communicating technical details to any audience.
• Willingness to travel extensively and work on-site with customers when required.
• Bonus points:
  
  • Experience with multiple database systems
  • Experience designing SDKs, integration libraries, or internal tooling that reduced services cycle time.

• $300 monthly budget towards commuter benefits or building your personal workspace (remote only)
• Competitive equity grant in a Series B company
• Medical, Dental, Vision, and Term Life insurance coverage at 100% for employees and 75% for dependents
• 401(k) matching up to 4%
• 4 weeks vacation, plus holidays and winter break
• All expenses paid company off-sites 2× per year

• Impact: Own growth at a fast-growing, high-leverage moment for the company.
• Mission: Accelerate the development of the next generation of robotics and embodied AI.
• Team: Work with world-class engineers, designers, and researchers passionate about open-source and developer tools.
• Ownership: Drive initiatives end-to-end, with high autonomy and visibility.