Senior Forward Deployed Hardware Engineer

Senior Forward Deployed Hardware Engineer

Somana is a generative robotics company. We founded the company because the incredible advances in the modeling layer have no way to access a fragmented physical world. We're building the connective tissue that brings physical AI into the industrial world.

Somana is a hardware, software, and services platform powering rapid improvements in capacity, throughput, yield, and quality. Our compute platform talks to hundreds of peripherals, living on factory floors and has capabilities that compound after every run - which means the mechanical systems that house, cool, protect, and connect them are as critical as the silicon itself.

ROLE OVERVIEW

As a Senior Forward Deployed Hardware Engineer, you will live on the edge, literally. This is a crucial role focused on initial diagnosis, system design, integration, validation, and performance of compute, camera, robotics, and data systems in diverse manufacturing and industrial environments. You will sit at the intersection of Mechanical, Hardware, Software, and AI systems. You will be responsible for ensuring our systems don't just work, but perform at a superhuman level, optimizing throughput, data quality, availability, and security. You will also serve as a technical voice with customers when a design decision needs to be explained in person, or to demonstrate new functionality.

We're a nimble team that strives to own problems end-to-end, work across disciplines, and thrive at the intersection of hardware and software.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Travel to customer locations including test ranges, manufacturing facilities, and air-gapped data centers. Partner directly with customer engineering and IT teams to ensure successful deployments.

• Build repeatable deployment patterns across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments. Reduce complexity and improve reliability as we grow.

• Work with internal R&D to identify priorities and high-impact infrastructure and deployment challenges.

• Capture logs, failure modes, and field learnings, and relay actionable feedback to engineering to drive product improvements and observability.

• Balance customer success with speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability when making technical decisions.

• Sweat the details that matter in this domain: perceived latency, interaction feedback, and graceful degradation when connectivity drops, because on a factory floor a flaky network is the default, not the exception.

PRIMARY QUALIFICATIONS

• BS in CS, Electrical/Computer Engineering, MechE, Physics or related experience

• At least 4 years of industry experience as a Hardware, Firmware, or Mechanical Engineer in a mixed HW+SW product team.

• Proficiency in at least one systems programming language (Rust, C, C++)

• Ability to work effectively across hardware and software teams

• Intellectual curiosity and the drive to understand problems deeply, whether from a technical, business, or client angle

• Exceptional collaboration and documentation skills - you can write crisply about design decisions and tradeoffs, and make async teams better through clear artifacts

• Take initiative, solve problems, and know when to escalate. Move quickly while maintaining a high bar for quality.
  

You may be a great fit if you have:

• Worked in customer-facing or Field Engineering roles, gathering requirements in the field that result in new designs, firmware, and/or HW tooling

• Experience working with time-series, sensor, CAN or telemetry data: charts, dashboards, and virtualization of large datasets

• Proficiency in networking concepts (IPv4, TCP/IP, mesh) and/or knowledge in embedded systems communication protocols (Ethernet, MIPI, I2C, SPI).

• Practical experience with perception sensors and pipelines (cameras, LiDAR, radar), or robotics middleware.

• Genuine passion for usability: you run your own user conversations, prototype from research insights, and treat operator feedback as the product roadmap

• Passion for robotics, IoT, simulation or other hardware-adjacent domains where software meets the physical world
  

Location and Compensation

• SoHo, New York City or San Francisco - Hybrid

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity - this is an early, foundational role

• Catered lunch, snacks, panoramic views, and pet-friendly office

• Health, Dental, Vision benefits, HSA + 401k