You’re a systems thinker who enjoys investigating failures that don’t fit neatly within one engineering discipline. An intermittent device disconnect, unexplained process crash, or robot that fails only under a particular sequence of events is a problem you want to understand—not simply work around.
You have a strong foundation in software, electrical engineering, computer engineering, robotics, or embedded systems. You’re comfortable moving between a Linux terminal and an electronics bench, and you can use evidence from both to build a coherent explanation of what the system is doing.
You debug methodically. You form hypotheses, identify what evidence would distinguish between them, add instrumentation, and design controlled experiments. You don’t stop at finding a way to make the problem disappear; you want to understand why it happened and how to prevent it from returning.
You’re comfortable working with incomplete information. You can take a report such as “the robot occasionally loses communication” and turn it into a structured investigation with clear next steps, owners, and data requirements.
You communicate clearly throughout an investigation. The people depending on you know what has been ruled out, what remains uncertain, what you need from them, and when they should expect the next decision.
You thrive in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment. You can balance urgent debugging with longer-term reliability improvements and take responsibility for getting both across the finish line.
What You’ll Do
Own the investigation of complex and intermittent robot failures across software, firmware, electrical hardware, networking, and electromechanical systems.
Serve as a technical escalation point for difficult reliability issues discovered during development, manufacturing, deployment, and day-to-day robot operation.
Triage incoming issues, establish their severity and scope, determine what evidence is needed, and drive each investigation from initial report through root cause and corrective action.
Diagnose communication problems involving interfaces such as Ethernet, CAN, USB, serial connections, and discrete I/O.
Write scripts and lightweight software tools to collect diagnostic data, automate repetitive investigations, analyze logs, exercise hardware interfaces, and reproduce failure conditions.
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Add and improve logging, metrics, health checks, and other instrumentation so that future failures are easier to detect and understand.
Develop bench setups, test harnesses, fault-injection methods, and automated regression tests that recreate real robot conditions and validate proposed fixes.
Support the bring-up and integration of new hardware releases, identifying interface problems before they become recurring production or field issues.
Identify recurring failure patterns across robots and use them to prioritize engineering improvements with the greatest reliability impact.
Help establish lightweight but effective practices for issue triage, incident reviews, regression testing, diagnostic data collection, and tracking corrective actions to completion.
What You Bring
A degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, robotics, mechatronics, or a related discipline—or equivalent experience demonstrated through systems you have built and debugged.
Experience integrating, testing, or troubleshooting complex systems that combine software, embedded electronics, communications, sensors, actuators, and physical hardware.
Strong working knowledge of Linux, including comfort with the command line, processes, services, system logs, device interfaces, and basic system administration.
Experience writing reliable software or diagnostic tools by responsibly leveraging AI coding agents. You do not need to be a specialized application-software engineer, but you should be comfortable reading and understanding existing code and writing reliable tools of your own.
A practical understanding of networking and digital communications, including concepts such as addressing, routing, latency, packet loss, bandwidth, timeouts, and protocol behavior.
Comfort reading electrical schematics and wiring diagrams and reasoning about power, grounding, connectors, signal paths, and hardware interfaces.
Hands-on experience with diagnostic equipment such as multimeters, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, bench power supplies, and communications adapters.
A systematic approach to debugging, with the ability to isolate variables, design useful experiments, and distinguish correlation from a demonstrated root cause.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly when coordinating investigations across teams and explaining technical findings to people with different areas of expertise.
Bonus Skills
Experience with industrial robots, warehouse automation, manufacturing equipment, or other production electromechanical systems.
Deep familiarity with one or more robot communication interfaces, particularly Ethernet, CAN, and USB.
Experience with tools such as tcpdump, SocketCAN, candump, logic analyzers, or protocol-specific diagnostic equipment.
Experience designing automated hardware-in-the-loop tests, reliability test systems, or manufacturing test equipment.
Familiarity with observability tools, time-series data, automated log analysis, fleet-health monitoring, or remote diagnostic systems.
Experience investigating problems involving EMI, grounding, signal integrity, power transients, thermal behavior, connector reliability, or wiring faults.
Familiarity with structured reliability and root-cause methods such as fault-tree analysis, FMEA, 8D, or failure reporting and corrective-action systems.
Experience supporting robots or other complex equipment operating in customer environments where failures must be diagnosed quickly, sometimes with incomplete data and limited physical access.
A portfolio, project page, or collection of technical write-ups showing systems you have built, integrated, instrumented, or debugged.
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