Forward Deployed Engineer (Customer Facing)

At Formant, we’re building the operating system for intelligent machines. Our mission is to unlock the full potential of robotics by making it effortless to manage, operate, and scale heterogeneous fleets—powered by AI. Our customers span autonomous cleaning, logistics, agriculture, and more. We’re a small, fast-moving team building real-world AI systems that operate beyond the lab.

As a Series A startup, we value builders who thrive in ambiguity, move quickly, and care deeply about customer outcomes.

We’re hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to be an external customer champion and help bring AI capabilities into real-world physical environments.

This role is ideal for someone who has experience with and enjoys working directly with external customers, solving messy operational challenges, and shipping practical AI-powered solutions. You won’t be working in isolation on research problems — you’ll be partnering with customers and internal teams to implement solutions that create measurable value.

You’ll work closely with senior GTM leadership and product engineering to deploy, refine, and scale AI-driven workflows across our customer base. Over time, you’ll grow into deeper ownership of deployments and strategic accounts.

What You’ll Do

• Support and implement end-to-end AI deployments for customers, from discovery through production rollout
• Participate in on-site customer engagements (approximately 25–35% travel)
• Work with external stakeholders to translate customer operational needs into technical requirements and working solutions
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues in collaboration with engineering
• Help document best practices and implementation playbooks

AI Solutions in Production

• Build and iterate on LLM-powered workflows, RAG pipelines, and AI-assisted automation tools
• Prototype quickly while balancing reliability and performance
• Integrate with customer systems and APIs
• Navigate real-world physical constraints (latency, connectivity, hardware limitations)
• Contribute reusable components that accelerate future deployments
• Support existing external customers and resolve their potential issues

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with product engineering to relay field feedback and improve platform capabilities
• Support technical conversations during customer engagements
• Help enable customer teams through documentation and training materials
• Contribute insights that shape product roadmap and deployment strategy

Who You Are

• 2–4 years in a customer-facing technical role (Solutions Engineering, Implementation Engineering, Technical Support Engineering, or similar)
• Exposure to LLMs, prompt engineering, or AI/ML workflows (production experience a plus but not required) and appetite working with AI tools
• Experience deploying technical solutions into production environments
• Strong programming skills in Python or TypeScript
• Comfortable working in ambiguity and learning new domains quickly
• Willingness to travel for customer deployments (25–35%)

Nice to Have

• Experience integrating APIs and building full-stack solutions
• Familiarity with React or SQL
• Exposure to robotics or physical systems (ROS, AMRs, industrial automation, etc.)
• Experience at a startup or in a fast-paced environment
• Background working with operational or industrial customers

Who Will Thrive in This Role

• Builders who prefer shipping working solutions over debating theoretical ones
• Engineers who enjoy interacting with customers and seeing their work deployed in the real world
• Curious generalists who can go from debugging logs to discussing workflow improvements
• Team players who collaborate closely across engineering, product, and GTM

Salary range for this role is $120,000-$140,000 based on experience and geographical location.

Please Note:

This position is remote, however, Formant only hires employees in the states of:  AZ, CA, CO, IL, KS, MA, NY, OK, OR, and PA.