Software Engineer, Data Engineering

FieldAI’s Irvine team is where embodied AI meets real robots, real sensors, and real field deployments. Based in the heart of Southern California’s robotics ecosystem, we build risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems that solve the hardest problems in robotics and unlock the full potential of embodied intelligence. If you want your work to ship, get tested on hardware, and improve through real deployments, Irvine is the place.

We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-only architectures, combining rigorous engineering with learning systems proven in globally deployed solutions that deliver results today and get better every time our robots run in the field.

Field AI is looking for a Data Engineer to build reliable data pipelines and infrastructure for robotics data  will work on systems that move telemetry, logs, sensor data, and operational signals from deployed robots into the platforms used by autonomy, analytics, ML, and deployment teams. This role is ideal for someone with a strong software engineering background who enjoys building production systems, working with cloud infrastructure, and owning data pipelines end to end.

• Design, build, and maintain production data pipelines for robot telemetry, logs, sensor data, and operational events.
• Build reliable ingestion, transformation, and orchestration workflows using tools such as Airflow.
• Develop backend services, APIs, and internal tools that make data accessible to engineering, ML, analytics, and operations teams.
• Work with cloud infrastructure on AWS, including object storage, compute, databases, queues, and data processing services.
• Improve pipeline reliability through monitoring, retries, backfills, schema validation, and data quality checks.
• Collaborate with robotics, autonomy, infrastructure, and deployment teams to support real-world robot operations.
• Help scale data systems for growing fleets and increasingly large datasets.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 3+ years of experience in data engineering, backend engineering, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Strong software engineering skills, preferably in Python.
• Experience building and operating data pipelines in production.
• Familiarity with Airflow or similar workflow orchestration tools.
• Experience with AWS services such as S3, Lambda, ECS, EC2, RDS, Redshift, Glue, Athena, SQS, or related systems.
• Good understanding of testing, monitoring, debugging, and incident response for production systems.
• Ability to work across teams and translate messy real-world data problems into reliable systems.

• Experience with AWS CDK, Terraform, Cloud Formation, or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Experience with Kubernetes, including deploying, operating, or debugging workloads in production clusters.
• Experience with robotics, autonomy, IoT, fleet telemetry, time-series data, or sensor-heavy systems.
• Experience with data lake or warehouse systems such as Redshift, Snowflake, Big Query, Databricks, or Athena.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and modern Dev Ops practices.

$115,000 - $170,000 a year

Our salary range is generous and we consider each individual’s background and experience when determining final compensation. Base pay may vary based on role scope, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and the Irvine, California market.

In Irvine, you will work where the robots are. Our local team builds and tests systems on real hardware with real sensors, then ships them to operate in unstructured, previously unknown environments around the world. We are solving one of robotics’ hardest challenges: reliable deployment outside the lab. Our Field Foundational Models raise the bar for perception, planning, localization, and manipulation, with an emphasis on explainability and safety for real-world use.

You will collaborate with a world-class team that thrives on creativity, resilience, and bold thinking. We bring deep experience from organizations such as Deep Mind, NASA JPL, Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, Amazon, Tesla Autopilot, Cruise,…