Forward Deployed Engineer

About Us

At InOrbit.AI, we are defining the management layer for physical AI through cutting-edge robot orchestration. Our mission is to unlock the full potential of complex robot fleets, bridging high-level intelligence with real-world physical execution. We cultivate an innovation-driven culture where team members drive core breakthroughs in agentic AI and physical AI, pioneering how multi-agent robotic systems perceive, reason, and interact in dynamic environments.

Our Values

• 0 to 1: we share a pioneer/startup spirit and explore new directions
• Work Fluid: we work collaboratively across the company and adapt to the terrain
• Builders First: we are product-centric and focus on value creation for all customers
• Always Be Learning: we learn from our failures/successes and are not afraid to experiment
• People Not Resources: we treat each other as humans, not robots, with respect, candor, and empathy
• Planetary-scale Impact: we strive for all this hard work to result in positive impact at scale

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with a small number of our most important customers and own the outcome: real, measurable value delivered in their operations.

You’ll work the way the best forward deployed engineers do — many capabilities for a few customers, rather than one capability for many. You’ll spend real time on the floor of warehouses, factories, and distribution centers, developing a deeper understanding of your customers’ operations than they have documented anywhere. Then you’ll go build.

The InOrbit platform is mature and already does a great deal. Your job is to deliver the value each customer needs by leveraging what exists, adapting and configuring where it fits, and building where there’s a gap. Knowing which of those three a given problem calls for — and having the judgment to not over-build — is the core skill of this role.

We build agentic products and we work agentically. You’ll be expected to use AI coding agents as a matter of course, which is a large part of how one engineer can carry several deployments at once.

You’ll operate as an extension of our core product team, reporting directly to our CTO. What you learn in the field, and what you build to solve it, shapes where the platform goes next. We’re small enough that the person closest to the customer’s hardest problem has real influence over the roadmap.

What You’ll Do

• Own a small portfolio of high-value customer deployments end-to-end — from initial setup, data integration, and platform configuration through to production operation and measurable results. You are the person their operations, engineering, and maintenance teams call first when something matters.
• Re-imagine operational processes, don’t just digitize them. Develop a deep understanding of customer workflows and technical environments, then design solutions that address the real constraints rather than the stated request.
• Build what’s missing. Develop new InOrbit connectors and extend existing ones, build integrations against customer systems, and create the tooling, scripts, and dashboards that make a deployment work — moving at the pace modern tooling allows.
• Automate yourself out of the repetitive work. Convert recurring manual interventions into tooling and playbooks that customers and the rest of the team can run without you. As the fleet grows, your manual workload shouldn’t. This is the point of the job, not a side effect.
• Visit customer sites to capture what can’t be captured remotely — the actual workflows, the workarounds, the constraints nobody wrote down — and validate that we’re delivering value against them.
• Drive the platform forward. Identify the patterns that recur across your customers, bring them back to product and engineering as concrete proposals, and help decide what becomes a platform capability versus a one-off.
• Diagnose hard, ambiguous problems spanning software configuration, integration, network, and robot behavior — and own the ones with no playbook yet. When something needs core engineering, bring a high-confidence case: repro conditions, logs, telemetry, and a likely root cause, not just a complaint.
• Engage directly with stakeholders at every level, from robot operators and plant engineers to IT and executive sponsors, and build the trust that makes the technical work possible.
• Prioritize ruthlessly. You’ll have more requests than capacity across several accounts simultaneously. Deciding what to do now, what to automate, what to push to the roadmap, and what to decline is part of the job.
• Leave the knowledge behind you. Document configurations, integration patterns, and solutions so the next deployment starts further ahead than the last one.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field, plus 3+ years in a technical, customer-facing or deployment role — or equivalent experience. Relevant backgrounds include forward deployed or field engineering, solutions engineering, robotics deployment, technical consulting, and software engineering with direct customer exposure. Former technical founders are encouraged to apply.
• Experienced enough to fly solo. You can take a vague, half-described, multi-factor problem with no clear owner and drive it to resolution without handholding.
• A track record of getting production software into real environments, working the way engineers work now — with coding agents doing much of the typing. Python is our primary language for connectors and integrations, and TypeScript/JavaScript comes up. What matters more than how fast you write code yourself is the judgment around it: scoping a problem tightly, reviewing what an agent produces with real skepticism, and knowing what’s actually ready to run in a customer’s production environment.
• Comfortable across the stack and across the boundary between software and physical systems: REST APIs, Linux, containers, cloud infrastructure, message brokers and streaming telemetry, and reading logs from systems you didn’t build.
• Proven expertise working with complex platforms and configuring products to meet exacting customer requirements — including the judgment to know when configuration is the right answer and when it isn’t.
• Strong prioritization and ownership. You can run several engagements at once, sequence the work yourself, and communicate trade-offs clearly rather than silently slipping.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical decisions to operators, engineers, and executives alike. Low ego.
• High social intelligence, with the ability to naturally connect and build rapport with both engineers and business stakeholders.
• Outcome-oriented, internally motivated, and energized by delivering real value in real operations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience with robots, industrial processes, and intralogistics.
• Hands-on familiarity with ROS/ROS2, MQTT, or robot fleet telemetry and diagnostics.
• Experience integrating with warehouse and manufacturing systems (WMS, MES, ERP) and the security and networking realities of enterprise industrial environments.
• Prior work at early-stage, venture-backed B2B startups highly desired.
• Project or program management experience.
• Master’s degree in a relevant field.

Travel and Environment

This role includes approximately 30% travel to customer sites.

The work happens on warehouse and factory floors — PPE, noise, shift schedules, and real industrial environments.

Compensation

We offer a competitive and flexible compensation package including base salary, a performance-based bonus, health benefits and equity. Actual compensation is determined considering experience level and geographic location.

Candidates must possess current and valid work authorization for the United States. InOrbit.AI does not provide sponsorship for employment visas (including H-1B, OPT/CPT, TN, etc.) for this position, now or in the future.