Generalist

Software Engineer: Product at Generalist (San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA)

Generalist· San Mateo, CA / Somerville, MA· $200k–$350k·

Role details

Salary
$200k–$350k
Work type
Onsite
Employment
Full-Time
Skills
TypeScriptReactFastAPIPostgresAWSAPI DesignRobot Model TrainingAI Coding Agents
Benefits

Equity

Summary

Build applications for customers and internal teams to diagnose, teach, QA, and run robots. The role involves crafting API interfaces, building tools and workflows, and implementing product ideas across web UIs, APIs, and hardware appliances.

Job description

ABOUT GENERALIST

At Generalist, we are on a mission to build general intelligence for the physical world and make it useful to everyone. We believe the industries and homes of the future will depend on humans and machines working together in new ways. Robots can help us build more and get more done.

We build embodied foundation models, starting with a focus on dexterity. This requires advancing the frontiers of data, models, and hardware, to enable robots to intelligently interact with the physical world.

The company embraces both large-scale AI and robotics as core to its DNA. Our team of researchers, roboticists, and company builders come from OpenAI, Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, and other frontier labs—with a track record of shipping AI breakthroughs. Before Generalist, we pioneered large embodied multimodal models and vision-language-action models (PaLM-E, research.google RT-2 deepmind.google/, Gemini Robotics deepmind.google/gemini-robotics), launched and scaled ChatGPT chatgpt.com and GPT-4 openai.com/gpt-4-research to hundreds of millions of users, engineered the foundations of autonomous driving, built next-generation robots (Atlas bostondynamics.com/, Spot bostondynamics.com/, Stretch bostondynamics.com/stretch) and pushed the limits of what they can do (from parkour youtube.com/watch to manipulation bostondynamics.com/, and testing robustness youtube.com/watch).

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a customer-facing product engineering role with many PM-like responsibilities.

You will build the applications that customers, deployment partners, researchers, and other internal teams will use to diagnose, teach, QA, and run our robots.

You will spend 1/4 of your time with customers learning about their use cases and distilling product requirements. You'll then be one of the key people responsible for implementing those product ideas.

Today, the product surface areas are web UIs, APIs, hardware appliances, robot interfaces, and human processes. You'll be expected to seamlessly work across all parts of the stack.

You’ll be responsible for:

  • Crafting external and internal API interfaces that customers and partners interface with to access Generalist systems
  • Building the tools and workflows that enable and accelerate the core missions of researchers, engineers, and operations partners company-wide.
  • The primary web application researchers, ops, and deployments use to evaluate and train robot models

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have strong intuitions for what makes for great user interfaces, and user experiences
  • Understand modern web stack technologies: Typescript, React, FastAPI, Postgres, AWS
  • Understand how to expertly manage and leverage modern AI coding agents to accelerate development while maintaining high quality production standards

Why work at Generalist

  • Culture: Tight-knit, research-forward environment with a mix of AI and hardware engineering. On-site presence in San Francisco (SFO) and Boston (BOS). generalistai.com/careers
  • Remote/Hybrid Policy: All open positions are listed as “On-site” (no remote or hybrid options).
  • Notable Perks: Not explicitly disclosed, but the startup’s rapid growth and $128M funding suggest competitive compensation and equity. The team consists of leading roboticists and AI researchers, offering exposure to cutting-edge work.
  • Engineering Culture: Heavy emphasis on technical staff (Software Engineers in ML Infra, Robotics Controls, ML Optimization, Infrastructure; Research Scientists in pretraining and post-training). Roles include hands-on robot operation and systems building.

Application questions