Software Quality Engineer Los Angeles, CA

Lab37 Robotics , is a technology company focused on the development and deployment of robots designed specifically for direct-to-customer food production. Our mission is to revolutionize the food industry by creating innovative robotic solutions that enhance efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. We are passionate about pushing the boundaries of technology to deliver cutting‑edge products that meet the evolving needs of our clients.

About the Role

Build the quality practices and systems that help connect kitchen teams, cloud services, and robotic production systems. As a Senior Software Quality Engineer, you will own test strategy, release validation, automation, and early issue triage across complex software and operational workflows.

You will work across frontend applications, backend services, cloud infrastructure, integrations, and robot‑adjacent interfaces. You will partner closely with product, culinary, operations, robotics, firmware, and mechanical teams to understand how the system is expected to behave, identify meaningful risks, and turn ambiguous operational requirements into practical test plans and reliable validation processes.

We are looking for someone who is deeply hands‑on, enjoys investigating complex problems, and takes ownership from planning through release and production support. You’ll collaborate with experienced engineers across disciplines while helping raise the quality, reliability, testability, and maintainability of our software.

What you’ll do

• Create and execute test strategies for complex product capabilities spanning user interfaces, backend services, cloud infrastructure, external integrations, and robot‑adjacent systems.
• Develop detailed test plans based on product requirements, technical designs, operational workflows, system dependencies, and potential failure modes.
• Own and coordinate release checkout, including defining readiness criteria, validating critical workflows, documenting results, identifying blockers, and supporting go or no-go decisions.
• Build and maintain automated tests for APIs, backend services, web applications, integrations, and end‑to‑end operational workflows.
• Partner directly with product, culinary, and operations teams to understand real‑world workflows, clarify requirements, and identify risks before release.
• Test software for configuring, observing, and managing kitchen operations, including order intake, menus, recipes, tasks, alerts, and performance visibility.
• Validate integrations with delivery and commerce platforms, including order intake, menu synchronization, order‑state communication, retries, duplicate events, and partial failures.
• Test operator‑facing and robot‑adjacent interfaces used in physical production environments.
• Work alongside firmware and robotics engineers to validate cohesive system behavior across software and hardware boundaries.
• Help improve system testability by contributing to simulation environments, mocked services, test data, diagnostic tooling, and repeatable test environments.
• Perform exploratory, functional, integration, regression, system, and end‑to‑end testing.
• Own quality activities through rollout and production support, including validation, observability, issue reproduction, early triage, and iterative improvement.
• Participate in an on‑call or support rotation focused on early issue investigation, evidence collection, initial classification, and routing to the appropriate engineering team.
• Work with engineers to improve logs, metrics, alerts, dashboards, and other diagnostic capabilities needed to validate and troubleshoot important workflows.
• Participate in design reviews, release reviews, incident reviews, and technical discussions to identify quality risks and improve software reliability.
• Share knowledge with teammates and contribute to engineering and quality best practices.

What we are looking for

• 7+ years of software quality, test engineering, or related experience, including ownership of complex test strategies or quality initiatives across multiple components.
• Deep experience creating and executing test plans for production software.
• Strong experience with test automation using one or more programming languages.
• Experience testing APIs, backend services, web applications, databases, integrations, and asynchronous or event‑driven workflows.
• Experience owning or coordinating release validation, release checkout, or production‑readiness activities.
• Strong debugging and investigation skills, including the ability to narrow ambiguous issues across multiple systems.
• Experience working with CI/CD systems and integrating automated tests into build and deployment pipelines.
• Strong judgment about where automation provides leverage and where focused manual or exploratory testing is more effective.
• Deep experience improving software quality, reliability, and testability.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate real operational workflows into practical validation strategies.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including test plans, release checklists, quality reports, operational playbooks, and cross‑functional alignment.
• Comfort working across boundaries and collaborating with both technical and non‑technical partners.
• Enjoy collaborating with teammates and sharing technical knowledge.

Nice to have

• Experience with API and service testing using Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, C#, or similar languages.
• Docker, Kubernetes, Protobuf, Terraform, Git, and continuous delivery systems.
• Simulation environments, mocked or simulated backend services, hardware‑in‑the‑loop testing, and integration testing.
• SQL, analytics platforms, operational dashboards, or data‑intensive product development.
• Software that interacts with hardware, robotics, IoT, logistics, manufacturing, fulfillment, or other physical operations.
• Experience validating systems that must handle intermittent connectivity, dependency failures, retries, partial completion, or delayed events.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Sentry, Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch, or similar platforms.
• Building internal tools or operational software used in high‑availability, real‑time environments.
• Experience participating in incident response, production support, or on‑call rotations.

What makes this opportunity different

High ownership: Own meaningful quality, release, and test automation areas rather than executing a narrow set of test cases.

Real‑world impact: Your work directly affects physical production, daily kitchen operations, and the reliability of systems used by operators and customers.

Technical growth: Work on challenging distributed systems, robotics‑adjacent software, test automation, simulation, and operational tooling while learning from experienced engineers across multiple disciplines.

Cross‑disciplinary work: Collaborate with software, robotics, firmware, hardware, culinary, operations, and product teams.

• Demand for online food delivery is growing really fast! In the last 5 years, just in the US, the overall market has expanded 10X from $10B to $100B, and could expand to $500bn- $1T by 2030.
• Changing the restaurant industry: You’ll be part of a team that helps restaurants succeed in online food delivery.
• Collaborative environment: You will receive support and guidance from experienced colleagues and managers, helping you to learn, grow and achieve your goals, and you’ll work closely with other teams to ensure our customer’s success.

What else you need to know

This role is based in our Los Angelesoffice. As a company driven by invention and continuous change - we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office‑based teams work onsite, five days a week.

The base salary range for this role is $180,000 - $230,000 per year.

Actual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package. You may also be eligible for equity awards and an annual performance‑based bonus.

Benefits Summary (USA Full-Time Exempt Employees):

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance (multiple plans, incl. HSA options).
• Company‑paid life and disability insurance (short‑and long‑term).
• Voluntary insurance: accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity.
• Optional supplemental life insurance for self, spouse, and children.
• 401(k).
• Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Flexible Spending Accounts (Healthcare, Dependent Care, Commuter)
• Discretionary vacation days
• 8 paid holidays per year

Benefits are subject to change at the company's discretion.
Atoms accepts applications on an ongoing basis.

Ready to join us as we serve those who serve others?

#LI-Onsite

As set forth in Lab37’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.