Forward Deploy Engineer
at Bucket Robotics — Defect detection for manufacturing built from CAD and synthetic data.
What the role involves
Role Overview
Bucket Robotics is hiring a Forward Deploy Engineer to work at the boundary between our core engineering team and real manufacturing deployments. You’ll spend most of your time in San Francisco building alongside our engineers—but regularly travel to customer sites across the U.S. to deploy, debug, and harden our system in real production environments.
This role is ideal for an engineer who wants to see their work leave the laptop and show up on factory floors—integrating cameras, models, and workflows with real constraints, real operators, and real uptime requirements.
Responsibilities
Deploy Bucket’s vision systems at customer manufacturing sites
Work directly with customers during onboarding, pilots, and early production runs
Integrate cameras, edge devices, and models into real production workflows
Debug issues spanning software, ML models, hardware, lighting, and environment
Serve as the technical owner for in-field issues from discovery through resolution
Collaborate closely with the core engineering team to reproduce issues and ship fixes
Translate real-world deployment pain points into actionable product and platform improvements
Build deployment playbooks, checklists, and internal tooling to make future rollouts faster and more reliable
Support technical evaluations alongside sales and leadership without being a sales role
This role will require travel for up to 30% of the time. You’ll be hands-on helping customers use our technology, and when in SF building alongside the rest f our engineering team.
Required Qualifications
2+ years experience in software engineering, robotics, systems, or field-facing engineering roles
Strong programming skills in Python
Comfortable debugging complex systems across hardware and software boundaries
Experience working directly with customers in technical environments
Enjoys wearing many hats and operating in fast-moving, ambiguous situations
Willingness to travel ~30% of the time to customer sites across the U.S.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience deploying or supporting ML or computer vision systems in production
Familiarity with cameras, edge devices, or embedded systems
Background in robotics, manufacturing, automation, or industrial environments
Experience with Linux-based systems and on-prem or edge deployments
Previous startup or early-stage company experience
What We Offer
Competitive salary & meaningful equity – help shape how our technology works in the real world
Comprehensive benefits – health, dental, and vision insurance
Professional development budget – conferences, courses, and skills growth
A chance to build something real – see your work running on factory floors across the country
Our Values
Innovation First: We solve hard, real-world problems in robotics and manufacturing
Ownership Mentality: We take responsibility from deployment through resolution
Customer Trust: We build systems customers rely on in production
Continuous Learning: Every deployment makes the product better
Bucket Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
What they ask for
About Bucket Robotics
Bucket Robotics builds deployable computer vision systems for manufacturing — without labeling, long pilots, or fragile rules. We turn CAD and sample data into production-ready vision models that run on existing cameras and edge hardware. No manual labeling. No cold-start problem. Models deploy in minutes and adapt as parts, defects, and lines change. Our roots are in self-driving cars (Argo AI, Uber ATG, Stack AV), where we learned how to ship perception systems that operators trust in messy, real-world environments. We’re applying that playbook to factories: robust sensing, fast iteration, and tooling engineers actually enjoy using. Manufacturers struggle with inspection because parts are too variable for rules-based vision and too expensive to inspect by hand. Legacy systems are rigid, hardware-locked, and slow to customize. We take the opposite approach: software-first vision that fits into existing automation and scales across SKUs, facilities, and workflows. American Manufacturing is in the middle of a $700B automation push — but quality is still a trust problem. Bucket Robotics is building the vision infrastructure that lets factories automate inspection with confidence.
Full Bucket Robotics profile