Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer (AI)

Location: Hybrid (Freiburg, Germany or San Francisco, USA). Candidates must be able to work from the office at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a mandatory monthly in-person week.

Salary: €120,000–€180,000 + Equity

Company

Black Forest Labs is a frontier research lab creating advanced generative models, including the FLUX series, used by millions of creators and developers worldwide.

What you will do

• Design and ship integrations, fine-tunes, and interfaces for VLA models from prototype to production for robotics customers.
• Optimize model performance for real-time, on-device, and edge constraints to ensure low latency and high quality on real robots.
• Prototype and validate high-value use cases in collaboration with customers.
• Implement novel techniques from recent research papers in coordination with the research team.
• Identify and lead opportunities to expand the company's technology into new physical AI domains.

Requirements

• Proven track record as a robotics engineer, forward deployed engineer, or technical founder.
• Hands-on experience with action/VLA models (e.g., π0, LeRobot), imitation learning, or reinforcement learning.
• Ability to handle broad engineering challenges, including model hosting, backend engineering, and frontend/UI development.
• Strong communication skills to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to travel for monthly in-person weeks in Freiburg or San Francisco.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of diffusion models, flow matching, distillation, and fine-tuning techniques.
• Experience with inference optimizations for transformer-based ML models.
• Proven ability to architect solutions in complex enterprise environments.
• Contributions to open-source projects in the space of robotics, simulation, or diffusion models.
• Experience with modern cloud platforms and deployment solutions.

Culture & Benefits

• Commitment to research excellence and open science.
• Low-ego environment where the best idea wins regardless of seniority.
• Bold approach to shipping ambitious bets and frontier technology.
• Flexible hybrid work model with reasonable travel costs covered for in-person weeks.
• Equity compensation as part of the package.