ABOUT THE ROLE:
We're looking for a Systems Test Engineer (5 month contract) to be our front line of robot uptime at a customer site in Boston. You'll work on-site to monitor daily protocol runs, respond to issues in real time, keep the system running smoothly and help engineering team prioritize and ship improvements.
This is a high-impact role where your reliability directly enables cutting-edge biological research. You'll work independently on-site while staying tightly connected to Medra's engineering team (in San Francisco) via Slack and our observability tooling.
WHAT WE'RE BUILDING:
Medra is building Physical AI Scientists: robotic systems that work hand-in-hand with leading biopharma partners to enable scientific breakthroughs faster than ever before.
🤖 Physical AI that can operate scientific instruments with human-level dexterity.
🧪 Scientific AI that can analyze results, reason about next steps, and close the loop autonomously.
We shipped our first production system over a year ago, recently raised a $52M Series A, and are opening one of the largest autonomous labs in the US. We're a small and ambitious team.
THE TEAM:
- We're a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers from companies like Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, and Neuralink. We're collaborative and love moving fast, both with our product and on team trips skiing or go-karting!
- As a team, we love nerding out about engineering and robotics — plus other topics like race cars or cooking. We like learning new things and then sharing our new knowledge with each other.
- Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don't mind intense discussions about design tradeoffs. If we have arguments or miscommunication, we resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:
- Maintain robot uptime and reliability across daily protocol runs, ensuring the system performs at peak efficiency
- Diagnose and resolve operational issues onsite using SOPs, playbooks, and your own intuition for the system
- Escalate complex issues to the engineering team with clear, structured incident reports including relevant metadata
- Monitor system health proactively using dashboards and alerting tools to catch issues before they cause production failures
- Perform routine calibration checks and preventive maintenance on the robot, peripherals, and consumables
- Document all incidents, resolutions, and observations to build a reliable knowledge base of site-specific issues and drive data-driven improvements over time
- Support remote and on-site engineering visits by assisting with hardware upgrades, validating software deployments, and performing test runs after changes
- Collaborate cross-functionally with customer scientists to coordinate run schedules and communicate system status
LET'S TALK IF YOU HAVE:
- Background in robotics, automation, or mechatronics
- 2+ years of experience in a manufacturing support, field engineering, QA, or production support roles
- Comfort around automation equipment — you should be able to follow SOPs, troubleshoot basic hardware/software issues, and know when to escalate
- Strong written communication — you'll be filing incident reports and coordinating with software and hardware engineers daily
- A dependable, detail-oriented approach with a bias toward documenting what you see and proactively flagging potential issues
- Willingness to be on-call or adjust schedule to support critical customer runs when needed
BONUS POINTS IF YOU HAVE:
- Familiarity with life science lab equipment
- Experience with observability or monitoring tools (dashboards, alerting systems, log analysis)