Forward Deploy Engineer

Manufacturers lose billions every year because quality inspection systems are difficult to deploy, hard to scale across factories, and too dependent on manual labor. Most vision systems require months of labeling, tuning, and retraining before they become production-ready.

Bucket Robotics solves this by turning CAD files and sample footage into deployable inspection systems — without requiring massive labeled datasets.

Our platform uses synthetic data generation, simulation, and edge deployment tooling to create custom computer vision systems for manufacturing environments, including defect detection, object classification, segmentation, and robotic guidance. Customers can deploy vision models in days instead of months.

We’re building the trust layer for industrial quality: inspection systems that are replicable across facilities, adaptable to changing production environments, and usable by operators on the factory floor from day one.

Our team comes from Michelin, Uber ATG, Argo AI, and Stack AV, where we built and operated large-scale autonomy systems in the real world. Today, Bucket Robotics is working with enterprise manufacturers across automotive and industrial production.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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

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.

At Bucket Robotics, we’re building AI-powered vision systems that solve real manufacturing problems—fast. Our stack is designed for rapid iteration, photorealistic synthetic data generation, and easy deployment to factory floors.

We work across the full stack of industrial AI:

Custom computer vision models trained entirely on synthetic data generated from CAD—no real-world defects required.

Blender-powered rendering pipelines with industrial materials, realistic lighting, and defect modeling, all configurable from the browser.

Models exported to ONNX and deployed on NVIDIA Jetson and x86 platforms for real-time inference on the line.

Outputs connect directly to manufacturing systems—ERP (SAP, Oracle, etc.), MES, and quality tracking—ensuring that inspection insights feed into production workflows.

We build with Python, Ruby, and Go across our backends and internal tooling. Our frontends are a mix of React, Tailwind, and ERB.

We're solving the cold-start problem in machine vision with an engineer-friendly platform built for real production environments. If you care about closing the loop between CAD, QA, and deployment—let’s talk.