Robotics Forward Deployed Engineer

We're looking for a technicallycredible, customer-oriented engineer toown a portfolio of customer sitesrunning Tutor robots in production.You'll be the primary partner for eachof your sites — the person theiroperations, engineering, andmaintenance teams call first whensomething matters — and you'll beaccountable for the operational andtechnical success of those deploymentsover time.

This isn't a traditionalcustomer success role, and it isn'tcore product engineering. You won't ownthe product roadmap or build newrobotic capabilities — that's R&D. Butyouwill write code: the scripts,tooling, dashboards, and playbook logicthat turn today's manual interventionsinto things that run themselves. Thepoint of the job is to make your sitesneed you less over time, and to solvethe hard, multi-factor problems that noplaybook covers yet. You'll developdeep working knowledge of how ourrobots actually behave in the realworld, diagnose issues across software,mechanical, and process dimensions, andpartner with engineering to drive thedeeper fixes — bringing the fieldcontext, prioritization, and validationthat makes those fixes right.

The roleis also genuinely relationship-driven.The customers in your portfolio willknow you, trust you, and rely on you.You'll spend real time on-site at yourfacilities, remote time on diagnosis,tuning, and building, and ongoing timepartnering with your customers'engineering and operations leaders.Your insights from the field willdirectly shape our product roadmap.This role sits at the intersection ofrobotics, operations, and customerpartnership — and the right person isenergized by all three.

Responsibilities

• Own a portfolio of customer sites end-to-end: be the primary technical partner for each, build deep trust with their operations, engineering, and maintenance teams, and be accountable for the operational and technical success of those deployments.
• Automate yourself out of the repetitive work. Convert recurring manual interventions into tooling, scripts, and playbooks that your customers and our remote team can run without you. The fleet grows; your manual workload shouldn't. This is the core of the job, not a side effect.
• Develop deep working knowledge of our robot systems — software, hardware, and operational characteristics — sufficient to diagnose issues credibly and build real solutions at the boundary of the product.
• Diagnose and resolve ambiguous, multi-factor issues in real-world environments — across software configuration, mechanical adjustment, process change, and root-cause analysis — and own the ones with no playbook yet.
• Partner with engineering on the deeper fixes: package high-confidence cases with repro conditions, logs, and a likely root cause, and bring field validation rather than just a complaint.
• Track the health and performance of your fleet — uptime, reliability, throughput, customer satisfaction — and act proactively on early signals.
• Be the voice of your customers in our internal roadmap conversations; translate field reality into structured product insight.
• Partner with Account Executives on expansion conversations, where operational success creates natural openings for growth.

 

Requirements

You clear a real technical floor, and then we select hard on judgment and people skills. Both halves matter; the second is what we weight most.

The technical floor (pass/fail):

• 3–7+ years in a technical, ideally customer-facing role: applications/field engineering, robotics deployment, solutions engineering, technical account management, or similar.
• Technical depth in at least one of: robotics, industrial automation, controls, mechatronics, manufacturing systems, or warehouse/logistics technology.
• Comfortable working hands-on with both software and physical systems in messy operational environments. You can read logs and telemetry, reason about a system you didn't build, and write the scripts/tooling to automate a manual process — you don't need to have built the robot from scratch.

What we actually rank on:

• Thrives in ambiguity — can take a vague, half-described, multi-factor problem with no clear owner and drive it to resolution. This is the single quality we weight most heavily.
• Strong judgment about what to fix yourself, what to automate, and what to escalate.
• Genuine relationship orientation — you take pride in being trusted by a customer over years, not just in shipping a project.
• Clear communication in both directions: technically credible with customer engineering and ops teams, and plain-spoken with non-technical operators and leaders.

The reality of the job:

• Roughly 30% travel to customer sites. The work happens on factory and warehouse floors — early shifts, PPE, noise, and real industrial environments. If that energizes you, great; if it doesn't, this isn't the role.

 

Nice to haves (zero or more)

• Direct experience deploying or supporting robotics in production.
• Background in warehouse, manufacturing, or other industrial operations.
• Experience bringing field context into engineering decisions to resolve technical issues.
• Deep interest in robotics, automation, or the future of physical AI.

Why This Role Is Unique

• Work at the intersection of cutting-edge robotics and real-world industrial operations.
• Own the success of real customers running real robots in production — your work directly determines whether the future of physical AI happens in their facility.
• Join during a period of rapid growth, where this function is central to scaling the fleet.
• Help define what this function looks like at Tutor — you'll be among the people who build the tooling and playbooks that later hires inherit.