This position is ideal for a senior or staff-level frontend-leaning full-stack engineer who thrives in highly autonomous, customer-facing roles and enjoys solving ambiguous, real-world problems end to end. It will appeal to engineers with strong React and TypeScript expertise, solid backend experience, and exposure to robotics, autonomous systems, or complex technical domains, who are comfortable embedding with customers, rapidly prototyping solutions, and translating real-world use cases into scalable product improvements. The role suits product-minded engineers who communicate confidently with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, enjoy frequent collaboration and occasional travel, and want to operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer impact while influencing core platform direction.

1. Why are you interested in this Forward-Deployed Staff Frontend role at Foxglove?
   I’m excited by the mix of deep customer collaboration and hands-on engineering in a domain I care about—robotics and observability. Embedding with teams that are actually deploying robots, shaping their workflows with Foxglove, and then feeding those learnings back into the core product is exactly the kind of high-impact loop I want to work in.

2. What is your experience with React and TypeScript in production systems?
   I’ve spent 6+ years building complex, data-heavy UIs in React with TypeScript—component libraries, real-time visualizations, and internal tooling—focusing on performance, DX, and maintainability. I’m comfortable owning frontend architecture end-to-end: state management, routing, testing, build pipeline, and integration with backend APIs.

3. Tell us about your experience working in robotics or autonomous systems.
   For the past 3+ years I’ve supported robotics/autonomy teams by building tools for log visualization, telemetry dashboards, and experiment monitoring. I’m familiar with ROS message structures, bag files, and typical autonomy stacks, and I’ve worked closely with robotics engineers to surface the right signals for debugging and validation.

4. Describe a time you embedded with a customer team to deliver a solution.
   I worked on-site with a customer’s perception team to build a custom log-inspection dashboard: we iterated side-by-side, connected to their ROS log pipeline, and shipped a React/TypeScript tool backed by a Node.js API on their own infrastructure. That tight loop let us refine requirements quickly and ensured they fully adopted and owned the solution.

5. How do you approach rapid prototyping with external stakeholders?
   I start with a thin, vertical slice that proves the core value: a small React UI, a simple Node/Python backend endpoint, and real customer data. I share it early, gather feedback live with the users, and iterate quickly behind feature flags. Once the concept is validated, I harden the prototype—refactoring into clean modules, adding tests, and aligning with the main product architecture.

6. What is your backend experience with Node.js/Python and APIs?
   I’ve designed and implemented REST and GraphQL APIs using Node.js/TypeScript and Python (FastAPI/Flask), handling auth, rate limiting, and schema validation. I’m comfortable with SQL-backed APIs and schema design, and I pay close attention to pagination, filtering, and performance so frontend integrations stay predictable and fast.

7. What experience do you have with cloud infrastructure and networking concepts?
   I’ve deployed services to AWS and GCP using containers and managed services, set up CI/CD pipelines, and worked with VPCs, load balancers, and IAM policies. On the networking side I understand HTTP, WebSockets, gRPC basics, and how to design secure, observable services that can run either in the customer’s cloud or on-prem.

8. How do you handle ambiguous requirements when scoping a project with a customer?
   I turn ambiguity into a clear problem statement and a short written scope: goals, constraints, non-goals, a rough architecture, and success metrics. I validate that document with the customer and internal stakeholders, then break it into milestones with explicit trade-offs, so everyone knows what we’ll deliver first and what can be iterated later.

9. How do you feed customer insights back into the core product team?
   I keep structured notes from customer sessions, share concise summaries with Product and Engineering, and open issues or RFCs that tie specific pain points to proposed changes. When possible I contribute upstream improvements myself—components, APIs, docs—so what we build in the field becomes reusable value in the main platform.

10. Why are you a strong fit for this Staff Forward-Deployed role specifically?
    I bring deep React/TypeScript experience, solid Node.js/Python skills, and hands-on robotics exposure, combined with a track record of working directly with external teams to ship real solutions. I’m comfortable owning problems end-to-end, traveling and pairing on-site, and turning messy, real-world use cases into productized patterns that benefit all Foxglove customers.

This position is a strong match for a staff-level frontend / full-stack engineer in the SF Bay Area who loves TypeScript/React but is also comfortable diving into Node.js/Python, ROS, and cloud-backed APIs, and who wants a forward-deployed, customer-facing role where you embed with robotics and autonomy teams, rapidly prototype and ship end-to-end integrations on their infra, shape Foxglove’s observability tools from real-world use cases, and travel on-site to act as a trusted engineering partner while feeding your learnings straight back into the core product and roadmap.