Robotics Application Engineer

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.

About the Application Engineering Team

Application Engineering is where Rhoda's AI meets the real world. We work directly with customers to understand their operational problems, determine where our platform can deliver value, and lead the application of Rhoda's AI model end to end — from model post-training and data collection, to robot tooling and work-cell design, to production deployments on the customer's floor. The team sits at the intersection of engineering, product, deployment operations, and business, with members in the US and Germany. Application Engineering is organized into three complementary roles — Application Engineers, Solution Engineers, and Technical Program Managers.

The Role

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.

What You'll Bring

• 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.