Sr. Robotics Field Engineer

Company Description

Third Wave Automation is a rapidly growing startup that has demonstrated its core technology components, proven its market fit, and just closed its Series C funding. If you are excited about cutting edge machine learning, robotics that affects the real world, and want to join a company where your skills can have a huge impact, you’ll fit right in.

Third Wave Automation is applying modern machine learning to materials handling—delivering site-specific forklift navigation and infrastructure-free pallet handling that continuously adapts to changing floor configuration and warehouse demand.

Third Wave Automation is looking for a Sr. Field Engineer. Our Robotics Deployment Operations team is responsible for the setup, integration, and maintenance of our autonomous forklifts at customer sites. The team works directly with customers at every stage of the process, serves as a first point of customer contact during deployment through product support, and works closely with the offsite TWA engineering team to ensure customer success.

This role includes 50-70% travel.

• Own the site as technical lead with the Field Engineering Manager: plan, risks, and the go / no-go call when the system is not ready for operations.
• Lead and coordinate the setup, integration, and maintenance of our autonomous forklifts at customer sites.
• Report on fleet adoption and utilization issues and metrics, including deployment progress, and effectively elevate technical risks by working closely with the Third Wave Customer Success, Product, and Engineering teams to improve product reliability and performance.
• Debug the on-site stack from first principles — Linux, networking, services, logs/telemetry, and integrations — and leave a root‑cause write‑up engineering can act on, not a workaround that fails when you leave.
• Do your own on‑robot hardware work when that is the fastest path: hand tools, parts replacement, retrofits, and field upgrades.
• Manage and maintain the site system configuration while also providing improvements for future system configurations.
• Interface and integrate with the customer warehouse management system (WMS).
• Be the face of the company to our customers.
• Work directly with the customer, serving as a first point of contact during product deployment through Go Live.
• Be a subject matter expert on how our system is deployed and operated.
• Engage with pertinent internal stakeholders to ensure clear and comprehensive training on operating the TWA fleet and best practices are provided to the customer.
• Turn what you learn on site into the system of record: implementation playbooks, optimization notes, and best practices other engineers can run without calling you.
• Support on‑site product testing and provide detailed feedback.
• Write tools and scripts that remove repetitive setup and debug work, and use LLMs and coding assistants to triage logs, draft diagnostics, and generate first‑pass fixes.
• Weekends and odd hours may be required.

• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Robotics, Engineering, Computer Science or related technical field.
• 6+ years of field experience coordinating with customers, being well‑versed in various robotics expertise including hardware, software, and network.
• Outstanding customer relationship management skills.
• Understanding and experience with change management processes.
• Industrial automation experience. Experience working with and repairing industrial machinery.
• Linux experience (command‑line tools, networking, administration).
• Programming experience (Python, C++) preferred.
• Excellent written and interpersonal communication skills.
• Experience with standard office productivity tools (Google suite, Slack, etc.).
• Ability to write tools and…