Forward Deployed Engineer - Physical AI

Details

About Nebius

Nebius is building a full-stack AI cloud platform for the global AI economy, solving problems across compute, storage, networking and applied AI. The company is publicly listed and has a global R&D footprint. This role sits at the intersection of customer engineering and the core Physical AI platform: robotics, autonomous systems, simulation, world models, and embodied intelligence operating in the real world.

Role summary

The Forward Deployed Engineer, Physical AI Systems is a senior, high-autonomy individual contributor embedded with strategic customers and ISV partners. You will own end-to-end technical execution inside accounts (discovery, scoping, design, build, production rollout) and translate customer failures into product insights, datasets, scenarios, tests, and retraining loops. Across accounts you will identify patterns worth productizing and partner with Product and Engineering to fold them into the core platform. You will work remotely from the United States (SF Bay Area, CA or Austin, TX preferred).

Responsibilities

• End-to-end ownership inside strategic accounts: discovery, technical scoping, system design, build, and production rollout; partner directly with customer engineering teams to translate ambiguous problems into deployable production systems.
• Build and own Physical AI workflows across real-world and synthetic data, model training, evaluation, deployment, and failure capture for perception, autonomy, world models, and policy-learning use cases.
• Design scenario-based evaluation workflows, regression testing, failure analysis, and before-vs-after model comparisons; define real-to-sim-to-real and failure-to-retrain loops.
• Work with customer datasets including video, images, telemetry, annotations, simulation outputs, and deployment logs; decide where to build, buy, or integrate across labeling, synthetic data, simulation, training, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Integrate NVIDIA ecosystem tools where useful (Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Cosmos, NeMo, GR00T, Jetson) and stand up ISV integrations (simulation frameworks, robotics toolchains, data management vendors).
• Identify prototypes suitable for productization and partner with Field CTO, Product, and Engineering to harden them into platform components.
• Maintain rapid engineering velocity using modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and treat engineering velocity as a primary success metric.
• Produce field enablement artifacts (reference architectures, solution templates, technical blogs) and maintain structured feedback loops to Product and Engineering.
• Represent Nebius at customer deep-dives, ISV co-builds, and industry events (CVPR, CoRL, ICRA, RoboBusiness, NeurIPS workshops).

Requirements

• 6+ years of hands-on engineering experience in applied ML, physical AI, computer vision, robotics, simulation, autonomy, or AI/ML platforms, including at least two years in a customer-facing or deployment-oriented technical role (e.g., Forward Deployed Engineer, founding engineer, tech lead embedded with customers).
• Demonstrated experience building real ML systems beyond notebooks: data pipelines, training pipelines, evaluation harnesses, model versioning, deployment, and monitoring at meaningful scale.
• Strong Python engineering skills and hands-on experience with PyTorch or similar ML frameworks.
• Practical understanding of evaluation, metrics, failure analysis, data quality, model improvement loops, sim-to-real gaps, domain shift, edge cases, and production reliability.
• Experience with multimodal datasets (video, images, telemetry, annotations).
• Fluent in modern AI-native development workflows and tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) to accelerate implementation.
• Strong working knowledge of GPU compute, distributed training infrastructure, high-throughput storage, and orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes, Ray, Slurm, etc.).
• Comfortable shipping code inside customer environments and earning credibility with customer engineers and CTOs quickly.
• High agency, strong communication (written and verbal), and a prototype mindset (80/20 prototyping vs hardening).

Nice-to-have / Added bonus

• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer or equivalent customer-embedded function.
• Founding engineer or technical co-founder experience at robotics, simulation, autonomous systems, or foundation-model companies.
• Familiarity with Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Omniverse, Cosmos, NeMo, GR00T, ROS2, Jetson, MuJoCo, Drake, FiftyOne, MCAP, Foxglove.
• Experience with synthetic data generation, scenario generation, simulation-based evaluation, world models, vision-language-action models, policy learning, reinforcement learning, representation learning.
• Experience building model evaluation platforms, golden datasets, regression testing, or failure clustering systems.
• Open-source contributions to relevant Physical AI ecosystem projects.

Benefits & Pay Transparency

• Health insurance: 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and families.
• 401(k): up to 4% company match with immediate vesting.
• Parental leave: 20 weeks paid for primary caregivers, 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Remote work reimbursement: up to $85/month for mobile and internet.
• Company-paid short-term, long-term, and life insurance coverage.
• Competitive compensation; base compensation range: $169,900 — $254,900 USD (actual compensation depends on experience, skills, level, and location).

Equal opportunity & Work authorization

Nebius is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants must be authorized to work in the country in which they apply and will be required to provide proof of employment eligibility as a condition of hire.