Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

We’re hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to be our hands and eyes onsite at a key customer in Normal, IL. You’ll be responsible for our fleet of data collection devices — diagnosing and repairing devices, provisioning new hardware, troubleshooting networking, and running the diagnostic workflows that keep the system healthy. This role will start with critical robot data collection devices and then transition into robot deployment support.

This is a forward-deployed role with strong support from HQ. You won’t be alone: our engineering team is one Slack message away, and you’ll work closely with them to escalate complex issues, ship fixes back into the product, and bring the voice of the customer into our roadmap. The ideal candidate is technically curious, calm under pressure, and energized by being the person on the ground who makes things work.

Responsibilities

• Provision new hardware by installing and configuring Linux, deploying our software stack, and validating device health before bringing units into production.
• Run diagnostic scripts, collect and interpret system logs, and execute command-line workflows to identify root causes of device or network issues.
• Configure and troubleshoot local networking (IP, DHCP, DNS, VLANs, Wi-Fi/Ethernet) to ensure reliable device connectivity to our backend.
• Serve as the customer's primary technical point of contact onsite, coordinating closely with HQ engineering and support to resolve issues and feed field learnings back into the product.
• Develop code fixes for issues found in the field, including root-causing problems down to the code level and submitting changes through Git and code review.
• Test and validate SW trials on field devices by running test plans, capturing results and regressions, and giving a go/no-go before builds roll out fleet-wide.
• Be part of the SW sprints by joining planning, standups, and retros, picking up field-related tickets, and helping prioritize the backlog based on customer impact.
• Bridge the gap between the SW team and FDE by turning field observations into reproducible bug reports (logs, steps, telemetry) and relaying software changes and new workflows back to the onsite team.
• Build scripts and small tools that automate provisioning, diagnostics, log collection, and routine fleet maintenance.
• Monitor fleet health using dashboards, metrics, and logs to catch issues early and verify that deployed fixes resolved the problem.
• Support staged software rollouts and rollbacks across device groups.
• Maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and known-issue documentation.

Qualifications

• Hands-on hardware and software troubleshooting experience, ideally with microcomputers, embedded devices, cameras, or similar single-board computers.
• Comfort with Linux system administration: installing distributions, package management, systemd services, file permissions, and basic shell navigation.
• Working knowledge of Bash (and ideally Python) for reading and running simple diagnostic scripts and automating routine tasks.
• Solid networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, subnets, DNS, DHCP, basic firewall rules, and fluency with tools like ping, traceroute, tcpdump, and ssh.
• Strong customer-facing communication skills and the self-direction to operate independently onsite while staying tightly coordinated with a remote HQ team.
• Software development experience, with the ability to read, debug, and write production code (Python preferred).
• Experience with Git-based workflows (branching, pull requests, code review) and working in an Agile/sprint environment.
• Experience with software testing and validation: writing test cases, reproducing bugs, and clearly documenting results.
• Prior experience in a field service, forward deployed, or solutions engineering role (is a plus).
• Familiarity with DevOps and software infrastructure tools such as Docker, Ansible, Portainer, etc (is a plus).
• Familiarity with computer vision systems, IP cameras, or industrial IoT deployments (is a plus).
• Experience with Git, basic scripting in Python, or remote device management tools (is a plus).