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Salary: USD 215,000 - 275,000 / annual
Standard Bots is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for a forward-deployed role embedded with one of their largest customers—an AI robotics company that drives Standard Bots' robotic arms via streaming APIs and SDKs. For the first 9–12 months, you will spend most of your week on-site at the customer's facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, then transition to a hybrid model (returning to the New York office 1–2 weeks per month).
You will own the technical vision for how advanced customers programmatically control Standard Bots' robots, including real-time streaming control, the Python SDK, ROS 2 integration, and safety limits for fleet motion. Your responsibilities span three core areas:
**Strategic Architecture & Long-Term Vision:** Define the future of the external control surface, generalizing on-site learnings into stable, product-level capabilities. Set the bar for reliability, safety, and observability across the platform. Ensure that field-discovered failure modes become tested guarantees.
**Complex Project Leadership & Execution:** Serve as the customer's primary technical point of contact and the team's eyes on their floor. Convert observations into prioritized, testable requirements. Make pragmatic trade-offs between immediate fixes and durable platform changes, documenting decisions for both sides. Ship fixes and features across the full stack—TypeScript/Node services, Python SDK, ROS 2 adapter, and robot controller—from first reproduction to release.
**Production Excellence & Organizational Leverage:** Root-cause hard problems on-site (real-time streaming faults, networking, safety stops, collision behavior) and turn them into fixes, tests, and runbooks. Pair with the customer's engineers to build their diagnostic and integration capabilities. Run weekly working sessions and contribute to monthly roadmap reviews, ensuring priorities and progress are visible to both organizations.
You are a technically deep, product-minded engineer who thrives in customer-embedded environments. You are direct and tactful with customers, resistant to shortcuts, and quick to ramp on large codebases. You want to spend most of your week at a customer site and see your work run in production daily.
**Requirements:**
- 8+ years of professional software engineering, including end-to-end ownership of a technical problem space and leadership of complex cross-team work
- Forward-deployed, solutions, or customer-embedded engineering experience is a strong plus
- Deep debugging skills across distributed systems: Linux, containers, networking, logs, timing—often on unfamiliar hardware with incomplete information
- Direct experience working with demanding technical customers; ability to decline requests tactfully and offer roadmap alternatives
- Strong written communication: requirements, incident write-ups, and decisions that both customer ML engineers and leadership can act on
- Fluency in Python and TypeScript/Node.js, with breadth across the stack (React, C++, Kubernetes)
- Working knowledge of ROS 2 preferred
- Robotics and real-time control experience is a plus: hands-on experience with robot control interfaces, streaming/trajectory APIs, motion control at 100+ Hz, safety stops, and collision handling
