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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Hanut Singh, a 30-year-old lead robotics application engineer at Chef Robotics based in Dallas. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
Before the AI revolution, we had the classical robotics scene, like the robots that make cars in factories. After the machine learning and AI boom, advanced robots emerged. For example, Teslas can now autonomously drive on the street.
As a robotics application engineer at Chef Robotics, I act as the bridge between AI models and messy real-world environments. I’m about to start my fifth year doing this work.
People always talk about how AI or robotics will take jobs, but there’s a flip side to this — it created mine.
The pre- and post-AI eras needed two very different kinds of robotics engineers
In the pre-AI era, robots were hard-coded to perform the same movement over and over a thousand times a day. Any change would cause them to fail to adapt. Post-AI boom robots adapt to their environment.
Society needs engineers who understand robotics, AI, and customers. Unlike traditional robots, the new generation of robots needs constant internet access and communicates via the cloud.
If you have a warehouse with an open floor plan, the robots working there can get lost. A robotics application engineer’s job is to figure out where to include these smart features, like spatial awareness. We have to go to a customer site, look at their requirements, determine what they need, and develop our smart tech accordingly.
When I graduated from my master’s program, there weren’t a lot of robotics roles out there
When I graduated with my master’s in electrical engineering with a specialty in robotics in 2020, my first job out of school was very development-oriented. There weren’t many AI-driven, dynamic automation roles in the industry yet.
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While in my first role, I applied for an application engineer role at Fetch Robotics. The job posting caught my attention because the company said it wanted a robotics engineer who understands AI robotics, but in a customer-facing role, doing deployments.
Mentorship and gradual experience helped me further my career in AI
I came in confident on the engineering side and a little less confident on the sales engineering side. Thanks to the mentorship of senior applications engineers, I quickly grew into the customer-facing and sales engineering aspects of the role.
I then became a senior application engineer and later got an offer from Chef Robotics. The company was at a point where it had a product, but it didn’t know how to deploy it yet. I came in as one of the company’s first application engineers in 2023, and now I’m a lead application engineer.
The salary ranges for this type of job from company to company. For an application engineer, the salary can be anywhere from $120,000 to $200,000. If you become a lead or a manager, it increases even more.
My company typically hires new graduates for our robotics application engineering roles
There was no role like mine a decade ago. You need an engineer in robotics who is well-versed in AI, with the confidence of a salesperson to talk to customers. Not many candidates have both these skillsets. Another reason it gets tough is that it’s a new role, so it’s difficult to find someone who’s experienced.
Looking back at when I got my first role as a robotics application engineer, I didn’t yet have the full skill set, but the company took a chance on me. Since I’ve started hiring for the role, it’s become clear just how difficult it is to find someone with direct experience for this type of job.
We typically end up hiring someone who has done traditional automation but not dynamic automation. Now that I’ve been with multiple companies, I know that what usually happens is we make a team with a few working engineers and then take recent graduates who we train into the role.
My team uses LinkedIn to scout for candidates
A lot of folks see sales and robotics in the job description and apply without understanding the role. Salesmen will apply, and hardcore roboticists will apply, so we end up scouting.
On LinkedIn, we mainly look for experienced engineers at Bay Area robotics startups. If we want recent graduates, we recruit from places like Carnegie Mellon University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The best thing to do if you want to become a robotic application engineer is to study robotics, but try to get some customer-facing experience. It might not be a robotics role — you might just get into it as an automation engineer at a warehouse.
In my experience, the best way to prepare for a role like this is to get real-world experience by working as an automation engineer in a warehouse and, at the same time, gain knowledge of robotics and AI by taking courses in them.
I think this is one of the safest jobs in tech right now
At this point, everybody’s heard of vibe coding, which is using AI tools to do the heavy lifting of coding software. These software teams are becoming smaller. When it comes to deploying the technology, AI cannot deploy the robots. This is a human-in-the-loop job in AI.
Robots are smart, but only when guided by someone who understands their limits and strengths. As this technology advances and new features emerge, a robotics application engineer will have more work to do.
I see the demand increase every day as new robotics companies pop up and they realize that they need someone to actually do the sales deployment and engineering to deploy these robots on-site.
If you have a career journey or AI story that you would like to share, please email this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.
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