Systems Test Engineer - Robotics

Job Description

Job Description

The role

As a Systems Test Engineer, you keep the company's autonomous lab running. You'll be the expert user of the system: preparing it for each day's science, running it, handling the remaining manual steps, watching the automated ones, and fixing what breaks.

The lab is moving from weekday daytime operation to 24/7 autonomous operation, and this role is how it gets there. Quarterly goals tie directly to utilization of key revenue-generating instruments, so your work shows up in uptime, throughput and customer results.

This is a hands-on, cross-functional seat spanning software, hardware, science and operations. It suits someone who wants to learn across domains and become the product user whose feedback shapes what the company builds next.

What you'll do

• Own production runs: prepare the platform for daily scientific workflows, launch runs, and make sure they execute smoothly. This is the top priority.
• Monitor automated steps through dashboards, alerts and logs, and step in quickly when something drifts.
• Troubleshoot hardware and software issues across robotic automation, liquid handlers, magnetic particle processors and plate-based workstations.
• Perform routine and corrective maintenance to keep robots and instruments up.
• Write clear incident reports that explain failures, root causes and fixes to engineering and science teams.
• Partner with engineering and science to improve operations, remove manual steps and harden the system.
• Help bring new systems and instruments online as the lab scales.

What we're looking for

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering or Bioengineering. The degree field matters more than the school.
• 0–3 years of experience, including internships or full-time work with robotics, hardware or automation systems. Startup experience, especially at a robotics startup, is a strong plus.
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting hardware or software automation equipment.
• Comfort validating systems by running them in production, rather than through a separate formal test process.
• Strong written communication, especially for incident reports.
• Flexibility to work rotating day, night and weekend shifts.

Not a fit for this role: pure QA backgrounds without engineering depth, or pure software profiles with no hardware component.

Nice to have

• Experience in systems test, field or forward-deployed engineering, production support, or robot operations.
• Background as a robotics or AI lab operator (for example, maintaining a robot fleet for data collection) paired with an engineering degree.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools: dashboards, alerting systems, log analysis.
• Familiarity with life science lab equipment.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and able to start quickly.