Member of Technical Staff, Deployment Engineer

About IndustrialNext

We envision a world where no manual labor is required to build anything and everything we want.

A Safe world with abundant creativity.

We're building a rapidly scalable, high-performing robotic system for fully autonomous factories. We deliver across multiple embodiments — bimanual / single-arm stations, wheeled humanoids, and mobile manipulators — on a shared stack. Every task we ship has to hit ≥99% success at human or industrial-automation cycle time.

Physical AI is moving fast. Academia and research-focused startups have shown promising early results, but very few have shipped robots that work at industrial precision, speed, and reliability. We have, and that gap is our work.

We invite highly talented AI and robotics engineers excited to join a hyper-scaling startup. You'll work tirelessly to ship first products to early customers while building the foundation models and robots to reshape global manufacturing.

What we believe

• Real-world deployment beats paper benchmarks. Our bar is what runs at customer cycle time with high success rate and dexterity. Every shift, for months and years.
• Commercialized Data Flywheel is critical for Scalable Foundation Models. We're not waiting until our foundation model is ready. We build and deploy working robots, while also building a data pipeline to feed into our foundation model.
• Hardware iteration speed is a moat. Custom grippers, mobile platforms, and data rigs at production runs of dozens to hundreds. Moving fast from hardware design to deployment is what wins.

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Role: Member of Technical Staff, Deployment Engineer

Why this role matters Customer-site deployment and test infrastructure are the two functions that decide whether what we build in SF survives contact with a real factory floor. We need someone who can run a multi-week line trial at a customer site, debug live, and at the same time build the test rigs and regression suites in SF that prevent the same failure modes from coming back.

What you'll do

• Run customer-site deployment, bring-up, and on-site iteration through line trials.
• Build the test infrastructure — hardware-in-the-loop rigs, regression suites, integration validation.
• Bridge SF engineering and field operations; debug across the seam.

Required

• Education. BS in CS / CSE / EE / ME / Robotics; equivalent industry depth.
• Experience. 5+ years shipping robotics or industrial-automation systems on real customer sites — has lived through a multi-week customer pilot or line trial.
• Test infrastructure design. Built hardware-in-the-loop test rigs, integration-testing harnesses, and regression suites; owned them through the full product lifecycle.
• On-site customer work. Comfortable on a factory floor for weeks at a time. Has debugged production failures alongside customer engineers without losing the relationship.
• Cross-disciplinary debugging across Hardware, sensors, ML, control.
• ROS / ROS2 fluency. Built or substantially extended ROS2 nodes / pipelines in production.
• Travel willingness. 50%+ travel at customer sites expected.

Strongly preferred

• Forward-deployed / customer-facing engineer experience at a robotics or industrial-automation company.
• Industrial OEM (automotive, manufacturing, electronics) deployment background.
• Shop-floor automation programming — you've written the scripts that make a line bring-up reproducible.
• Has owned a customer pilot from kickoff through commitment metrics.
• Comfort writing customer-facing technical communication — debug reports, RCA documents, status memos.

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How we work

We are looking for hard, relentless engineers who treat shipping as the only metric.

• In-person, on the hardware. SF, on-site, full-time. Relocation will be supported.
• Insane work ethic. Startups win by fast speed, focused and relentless pushes.
• High ownership, high equity. Small team, meaningful equity. Your contribution is significant.
• Demanding and fast-paced. Tight timing constraints, customer commitments, little slack.

If you've thrived at SpaceX, Tesla, or other fast-moving startups, you'll recognize the energy. If "work-life balance" is your top filter, we are not the right fit.

What we offer

• Competitive base salary + meaningful equity in an early-stage, fast-growing company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Relocation support to SF Bay Area.
• A team you'll learn from every day, working on problems that haven't been solved yet.

Equal opportunity We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on merit and welcome candidates from any background.