Novel role · Auto-detected from posting description
Forward Deployed, Robotics Engineer
Black Forest Labs·Engineering
Posted Jun 23, 2026·Open for 3 days (and counting)
Key details
Function
Engineering
Seniority
Mid
Workplace
Hybrid
Location
Freiburg (Germany)
Compensation
EUR 120K – 180K
Specialty
Robotics
Tech stack
Diffusion ModelsVlaTransformersReinforcement LearningImitation Learning
What makes this role novel
Forward Deployed roles embedding generative AI models into robotics/physical systems represent a new category emerging as foundation models expand beyond software into hardware integration, requiring specialized expertise in bridging cutting-edge AI with real-world robotic applications.
Archetype: Engineering
Job Description
We're the team behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and FLUX—foundational technologies that changed how the world creates images and video. We’re creating the generative models that power how people make images and video—tools used by millions of creators, developers, and businesses worldwide. Our FLUX models are among the most advanced in the world, and we're just getting started.
Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany with a growing presence in San Francisco, we're scaling fast while staying true to what makes us different: research excellence, open science, and building technology that expands human creativity.
Why This Role
We're hiring a Forward Deployed, Robotics Engineer to put our models into the hands of our most important robotics and physical-AI customers. This is a high-ownership, build-in-public role: you'll embed with customers, ship real integrations on their robots, and feed what you learn straight back into our models and roadmap.
We care more about slope than years on a CV. If you've shipped robot-learning systems that real people use, in research, open source, or production; and you love being close to both the hardware and the customer, we want to hear from you, even if your background doesn't match every line below.
What You’ll Work On
Partner with customers to design and ship integrations, finetunes, and interfaces on top of BFL's models, including our action / VLA models from first prototype to production.
Get models running well in the customer's environment: strong latency and output quality on real robots, across on-prem and BFL-hosted deployments, including real-time and on-device / edge constraints.
Find the highest-value use cases with customers and prototype solutions fast.
Identify and own opportunities to expand BFL's technologies into new domains
Prototype novel techniques from recent research papers in close collaboration with our research team
What We’re Looking For
Proven track record as a robotics engineer, forward deployed engineer or technical founder
Experience working directly with customers, iterating on solutions and providing tailored support for serving generative AI models
Hands-on experience with action / VLA models and the surrounding open ecosystem (e.g. π0/π0.5, LeRobot), including imitation/reinforcement learning or policy learning
Ability to work on a broad class of engineering problems, from model hosting and backend engineering to building intuitive frontends and UI
Excellent communication skills and experience collaborating with non-technical stakeholders internally and externally, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts in simple terms to both technical and non-technical audiences
While not required, it’s an added plus if you also have:
Prior knowledge about diffusion models and/or flow matching, and relevant fine tuning and distillation techniques
Experience with inference optimizations for transformer based machine learning models
Proven ability to architect solutions in complex enterprise environments
Contributed to open-source projects, in particular in the space of diffusion models, robotics, or simulation
Experience with cloud platforms and state of the art deployment solutions
How We Work Together
We’re a distributed team with real offices that people actually use. Depending on your role, you’ll either join us in Freiburg or SF at least 2 days a week (or one full week every other week), or work remotely with a monthly in-person week to stay connected. We’ll cover reasonable travel costs to make this possible. We think in-person time matters, and we’ve structured things to make it accessible to all. We’ll discuss what this will look like for the role during our interview process.
Everything we do is grounded in four values:
Obsessed. We are a frontier research lab. The science has to be right, the understanding deep, the product beautiful.
Low Ego. The work speaks. The best idea wins, no matter who said it. Credit is shared. Nobody is above any task.
Bold. We take the ambitious bet. We ship, we do not wait for conditions to be perfect.
Kind. People over politics. We treat each other with genuine warmth. Agency without empathy creates chaos.
If this sounds like work you’d enjoy, we’d love to hear from you.
Base Annual Salary:
EU €120,000- €180,000 + Equity
Audit details(provenance, verification trail, raw fields)
Core fields
Posting ID
blackforestlabs:5276450008Title
Forward Deployed, Robotics Engineer
Function
Engineering
Location
Freiburg (Germany)
Workplace mode
unspecified
Posted at
2026-06-23 12:17:01Z
Compensation
EUR 120K – 180K
Provenance
First seen (our scraper)
2026-06-23 20:01:42Z
Last seen
2026-06-26 04:40:30Z
Last updated
2026-06-26 04:40:30Z
Removed at
still open
Days open
Open for 3 days (and counting)
ATS adapter
greenhouse
ATS slug
blackforestlabsVerification trail
This posting hasn't been probed by our closure verifier yet. Stream C runs on a rolling schedule against postings approaching the close-decision threshold.
LLM enrichment
Enriched at 2026-06-24 01:52:38Z. Enrichment runs once per posting, never re-runs.
Seniority
ic_l3
Role archetype
engineering
Specialty
robotics
Workplace mode
hybrid
City (normalized)
San Francisco
Country (normalized)
United States
Comp range
EUR 120K – 180K
Tech stack
diffusion_modelsvlatransformersreinforcement_learningimitation_learning
Novel role archetype?
yes
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