Backend Engineer
Full-Stack Engineer, Forward Deployed
Remotefulltime
Apply on the employer's siteRole description
Build the data infrastructure that powers physical AI.
Physical AI is moving from research labs into production fleets across industries. As robots scale across the real world, from factories to vehicles, to defense - every workflow from product development to deployment becomes a data problem: what happened, when, on which robot, and why?
At Foxglove, we built the unified data platform for physical AI that developer and engineering teams use to answer those questions. We help teams make vast quantities of robotics data actionable, creating the data flywheel they need to develop, test, train, deploy, and operate robots with confidence.
About The Role
We are looking for an experienced and highly adaptable Forward-Deployed Engineer to join our team at Foxglove. This role is ideal for a product-minded full-stack engineer who thrives in customer-facing environments and enjoys solving complex technical challenges in robotics and observability.
As a Forward-Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with strategic customers to integrate and extend Foxglove's platform within their environments, while also contributing upstream to our core product. This position offers a unique mix of hands-on development, creative problem-solving, and close collaboration with customer teams. You'll act as a trusted engineering partner, ensuring Foxglove is seamlessly woven into customer workflows and identifying opportunities to drive improvements based on real-world use cases.
- This role does require 25-50% travel to customer locations.
What You'll Do
- Customer Collaboration – Embed deeply with customer teams to understand business goals, domain constraints, and technical requirements.
- Design & Development – Architect and build end-to-end solutions with an experiment-driven, iterative approach (TypeScript/React, Node.js, Python, ROS, SQL).
- Scoping & Planning – Draft clear scopes of work, timelines, and success metrics for proofs-of-concept through production roll-outs.
- Hands-On Delivery – Code side-by-side with customer engineers, deploying on their cloud or on-prem environments to ensure successful adoption.
- Cross-Functional Alignment – Partner closely with Sales and Customer Success on the same accounts to guarantee seamless experiences and measurable outcomes.
- Product Feedback Loop – Relay frontline insights to Research, Product, and Engineering; your learnings shape our roadmap.
- Internal Enablement – Document best practices, contribute to internal libraries, and mentor future FDEs so the function scales efficiently.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of professional experience with modern full-stack technologies (TypeScript/Node.js, React, Python)
- 3+ years of professional experience in Robotics or Autonomous systems
- Experience in customer-facing engineering roles, ideally with robotics or autonomy exposure.
- Proven history of rapid prototyping and iterative delivery with external stakeholders.
- Solid grasp of network and cloud architecture (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and database-backed REST APIs.
- Comfortable building across the stack — from data pipelines and APIs to the interfaces engineers use every day
- Comfortable owning problems end-to-end, learning what’s missing, and communicating technical details to any audience.
- Willingness to travel extensively and work on-site with customers when required.
Bonus points
- Experience with C++ or ROS in a robotics context
- Experience designing SDKs, integration libraries, or internal tooling that reduced services cycle time
- Experience with multiple database systems
Why join Foxglove
- Work on real robotics problems. Robot data is large, messy, multimodal, time-sensitive, and tied to physical-world behavior. The problems we work on span ingestion, indexing, search, visualization, replay, connectivity, collaboration, evaluation, and operations.
- Build tools engineers rely on. Foxglove is used by robotics teams investigating failures, validating changes, reviewing field behavior, curating datasets, and operating production fleets. The work you do helps teams understand what their robots saw, what they did, and why they behaved the way they did.
- High-leverage product surface area. A better query path, visualization workflow, Fleet connection, UI primitive, API, onboarding flow, or customer deployment can change how an entire robotics team works.
- Ownership and autonomy. We’re a small team, and people at Foxglove own meaningful work end-to-end. You’ll have real influence over product direction, technical architecture, customer outcomes, and how we operate as a company.
- Strong peers and high standards. You’ll work with people who care about correctness, performance, craft, product judgment, and building software that technical users trust under pressure.
- A mission grounded in production software. We accelerate robotics and physical AI by building the infrastructure teams use every day to connect to robots, inspect live telemetry, manage multimodal data, replay runs, investigate failures, and improve real systems.
What We Offer
- Competitive equity grant in a Series B company.
- Medical, dental, vision, and term life insurance coverage at 100% for employees and 75% for dependents, for U.S. full-time employees.
- 401(k) matching up to 4%, for U.S. full-time employees.
- 4 weeks of vacation, plus holidays and winter break.
- All-expenses-paid company offsites 1–2× per year.
- $300 monthly budget toward commuter benefits or building your personal workspace, depending on role/location.
About
Learn more about how we hire and work
foxglove.dev/careers
Equal opportunity
Foxglove is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome candidates from different backgrounds, experiences, and communities, and we’re committed to building an inclusive environment for everyone.
We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every nice-to-have listed above. The strongest candidates often bring a mix of relevant experience, curiosity, judgment, and the ability to learn quickly.
About Foxglove
Foxglove is the data platform for Physical AI. Built for robotics teams developing real-world systems, Foxglove provides a purpose-built, modular platform to collect, organize, and learn from vast quantities of multimodal data, creating the data flywheel to safely scale from development to distributed fleets. Founded in 2021, Foxglove supports hundreds of customers across automotive, aerospace, defense, logistics, agriculture, construction, and consumer robotics to deploy the next generation of intelligent machines. Learn more at foxglove.dev.
Compensation Range: $220K - $240K
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