Robotics Application Engineer

As an Application Engineer, you are the hands-on technical lead in the early stages of a customer engagement - Scoping, Proof of Principle (POP), and Proof of Concept (POC). You’ll determine whether a use case is feasible, design and prototype the end effectors and task tooling a robot needs to do the job, write the data collection procedures that feed our models, and post-train Rhoda’s AI model to perform the task. You’ll spend real time on customer sites standing up POCs and showing what our platform can do.

What You’ll Do

• Scope new customer use cases alongside the sales team: ask the right questions, assess technical feasibility, and make go/no-go recommendations.
• Design, prototype, and iterate on end effectors and task-specific tooling for real-world manipulation tasks.
• Author and refine data collection SOPs, and work with teleoperation and ML ops teams to gather high-quality training data.
• Post-train and evaluate Rhoda’s AI model on customer tasks, driving performance toward POC success criteria.
• Lead on-site POC setup and execution, including model training, daily reporting, and direct customer interaction.
• Partner with Solution Engineers on task engineering and solution design input as engagements move toward production.
• Review proposals and provide technical feedback ahead of purchase orders.
• Support model training through Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT), deployment, and Site Acceptance Testing (SAT).
• Share field learnings with product and engineering to improve the platform.

Robotics, Software Engineering, Robotics, Manufacturing, Hardware Development, Machine Tool, Data Collection, Organizational Skills, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AI), * BS or MS in Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field.

• 3-8 years of hands-on experience in robotics, automation, or applied engineering in an industrial setting.
• Strong mechanical design skills, including CAD (e.g., SolidWorks, Onshape, Fusion) and rapid prototyping (3D printing, machining, off-the-shelf components).
• Working knowledge of machine learning workflows - data collection, training, and evaluation - and comfort working in Python.
• Experience with robot arms, grippers, and sensors in real environments.
• Strong problem-solving skills and comfort working with ambiguity in high stakes environments.
• Clear communicator who can explain technical tradeoffs to customers and internal teams.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites, including extended on-site POC periods (domestic and international).

Nice to Have

• Experience with imitation learning, VLA models, world models, or robot foundation models.
• Background in factory automation, material handling, or logistics.
• Experience in a customer-facing technical role (application, field, FDE, or sales engineering).
• Familiarity with teleoperation systems.

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We’ve raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.