Systems Test Engineer - Contract

Medraai
San Francisco, CA

Who this role is best for

Strong fit for candidates with robotics/automation experience who prioritize on-site reliability and cross-functional collaboration, particularly in life science research environments with a mid-level seniority expectation.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with hands-on automation experience and a knack for proactive system monitoring
    — “Monitor system health proactively using dashboards and alerting tools
  • Individuals who thrive in mission-driven teams with intense technical discussions
    — “Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don't mind intense discussions about design tradeoffs.
  • Professionals with background in scientific instrumentation and protocol execution
    — “Maintain robot uptime and reliability across daily protocol runs

Things to consider

  • On-call availability may be required to support critical customer runs
    — “Willingness to be on-call or adjust schedule to support critical customer runs when needed
  • Geographic commitment needed for San Francisco-based on-site work
    — “work on-site to monitor daily protocol runs

How to stand out

  • Highlight experience with SOP-based troubleshooting and incident documentation
    — “Diagnose and resolve operational issues onsite using SOPs, playbooks, and your own intuition
  • Demonstrate familiarity with observability tools and preventive maintenance protocols
    — “Experience with observability or monitoring tools (dashboards, alerting systems, log analysis)
  • Emphasize cross-functional collaboration with scientists and engineers
    — “Collaborate cross-functionally with customer scientists to coordinate run schedules
Pace · SteadyCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · CompanyLevel · Mid Level

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • system uptime
  • incident resolution
  • knowledge base
Typical background
roboticsautomationmechatronics

Skills & requirements

Required

RoboticsAutomationMechatronics

Preferred

Life Science Lab EquipmentObservability Tools

Stack & domain

RoboticsAutomationMechatronicsCommunicationLife Science

About the role

Original posting from Medraai via Ashby

What We’re Building:

At Medra, our mission is to use AI, robotics, and biology to accelerate life science research, with the ultimate goal of eradicating disease. We have been quietly building the foundational layers of our Physical AI Scientist platform:

🤖 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.

This is an incredibly ambitious mission, but we believe that a team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things.

The Team:

  • We're a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers and scientists 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.

The Role:

We're looking for a Systems Test Engineer to be our front line of robot uptime at Medra Lab 001. 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.

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
  • 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

(OPTIONAL) Bonus points if you have:

  • Familiarity with life science lab equipment
  • Experience with observability or monitoring tools (dashboards, alerting systems, log analysis)
  • 1+ years of experience in a manufacturing support, field engineering, QA, or production support roles

Medra is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. We value diversity at Medra and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

Source: Medraai careers (Ashby)

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