Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer
No salary listed
Junior
Bachelor's, Master's
Cambridge, MA, USA+1 moreMore locations: Boston, MA, USA
In PersonTravel 50%+ for on-site deployments, customer demonstrations, and operational support.
Field ServiceEquipment Field Service
About the job
Requirements
- A B.S. in Robotics, Mechatronics, Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- At least 2 years of hands-on experience debugging, troubleshooting, and performing root-cause analysis on complex systems with integrated hardware and software components in deployment.
- Practical experience parsing log files and writing basic diagnostic scripts in Python.
- A solid understanding of interactions between mechanical, electrical, firmware, and software layers in robotic systems.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to clearly articulate technical issues during solo customer engagements and shift handoffs.
Responsibilities
- Build, deploy, configure, and troubleshoot robotic arms, grippers, and camera systems on-site.
- Perform spatial and hand-eye calibrations and camera alignment during system setup.
- Manage incoming fleet ticket queues, prioritize tickets based on operational impact, and triage failures across hardware, software, and operational layers.
- Execute physical inspections, run diagnostic tests at robot stations, and perform root-cause analysis to isolate and reproduce field failures.
- Analyze telemetry, sensor streams, and system logs to form and validate diagnostic hypotheses.
- Partner with core hardware and software research and development teams to escalate complex issues.
- Advise software engineering on new tooling, scripts, and diagnostic features needed to streamline field bring-up.
- Develop standard diagnostic procedures, troubleshooting flowcharts, and operational guides.
- Surface recurring fleet issues to engineering to drive design improvements.
- Develop deployment documentation and procedures to support deployments by third-party integrators.
- Maintain clear, traceable logs for diagnostic events, field modifications, and escalation workflows.
- Travel 50% or more to lead on-site deployments, customer demonstrations, and operational support.
Desired Qualifications
- A master's degree in Robotics, Mechatronics, Systems Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Experience deploying learning-based control models, such as imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or end-to-end vision-to-action policies, on physical manipulators in unstructured environments.
- A proven track record of writing internal Python tools, command-line interface scripts, or automated calibration routines that reduce deployment and bring-up cycles.
- Experience acting as the sole technical lead on customer sites or high-stakes field demonstrations, managing on-site communication, de-escalation, and technical execution independently.
- Hands-on experience integrating and configuring industrial or collaborative robot arms with six or more degrees of freedom, such as Universal Robots, Franka, KUKA, or FANUC, with industrial communications including EtherCAT, CANbus, or Modbus and safety controllers.
- Experience managing edge devices, Linux network interfaces, and containerized robotics software stacks, including Docker, ROS/ROS2, and systemd.
- Familiarity with robotics diagnostic tools such as Foxglove Studio and ROS bags to capture edge failure modes and feed data back into core machine learning pipelines.
- Experience building field operational processes from scratch, including writing standard operating procedures, conducting failure mode and effects analysis, and structuring field support workflows.
About the company
Eka Robotics builds transport robotics systems that use automated guided vehicles, control software, and fleet management tools to move materials and automate handling. The platform trains robot controllers in simulation with self-supervised learning and then transfers the learned policies to real robots through sim-to-real reinforcement learning. It differentiates itself with a team from MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, DeepMind, and Boston Dynamics and a focus on physical AI, combining robotics, perception, control, and fleet management in one platform. The goal is to enable machines to automatically learn about their environment and continuously improve, delivering autonomous transport robotics and embodied intelligence for robotics and drones.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
N/A
Headquarters
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Founded
2025
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Eka is hiring ML, robotics, and embedded engineers to scale R&D.
- Official site says it is deploying intelligence into the physical world.
- Investor backing from MFV Partners and E14 signals early conviction in the thesis.
What critics are saying
- Eka disclosed no customers, deployments, or commercialization timeline after launch.
- Funding remains opaque, despite conflicting $13 million and $2.5 million reports.
- VFA must beat VLA competitors like Physical Intelligence by benchmarks, or fade.
What makes Eka unique
- Eka Robotics launched April 29, 2026 with force-first VFA robotics.
- Pulkit Agrawal and Tuomas Haarnoja combine MIT and DeepMind research depth.
- Custom tactile grippers and sim-only reinforcement learning target superhuman manipulation.
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Benefits
- Hybrid Work Options