Field Robotics Systems Engineer (Customer Deployments)

Medra; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k

Medical insurance

Dental Insurance

Relocation benefits

Unlimited PTO

Weekday dinners

Job summary

Medra is developing a Physical AI Scientist platform that can operate scientific instruments with human‑level dexterity, analyze results, reason about next steps, and autonomously close the loop. We seek a role that acts as a technical co‑founder, delivering high‑impact customer projects and shaping the roadmap for solving our customers' critical scientific challenges.

The ideal candidate owns end‑to‑end delivery, translates workflows into technical requirements, and integrates robots,

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production code.
• Demonstrated systems thinking: designing, implementing, testing, or debugging interfaces in a production system.
• Experience delivering technical solutions with customers or users, from an ambiguous problem to a working solution in use.
• A penchant for customer-facing engineering: you enjoy working directly with users, making technical decisions and being accountable for the result.
• A track record of learning unfamiliar technologies quickly and making sound decisions with incomplete information.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and surface problems early.

Responsibilities

• Operate like the technical co-founder of a small startup within Medra, owning end-to-end delivery of high-impact customer projects and defining the roadmap to meet customers’ most critical scientific challenges
• Translate scientific workflows into technical requirements, support system architecture from conception to delivery, and develop interfaces between robots, instruments, and software
• Design, build, and test scientific workflows on our Physical AI Scientist platform, combining existing capabilities with new production software and instrument integrations
• Make implementation tradeoffs with robotics and software engineers, deciding where to reuse existing capabilities and where a customer requirement needs new engineering
• Integrate, test, and debug software solutions in simulation and on physical robots
• Work with forward deployed scientists through integration testing, water runs, customer-site bring-up, and scientific validation, resolving engineering blockers along the way
• Diagnose failures across software, instrument behavior, robotics, and customer infrastructure, and work with specialist engineers to resolve them
• Extend deployed systems to support new instruments, consumables, and workflows, rolling out releases with appropriate verification and clear operating guidance
• Bring deployment learnings back into the platform by generalizing integrations and sharing reusable tests, diagnostics, and tooling with other deployment teams
• Clearly explain technical decisions, limitations, and risks to customers and teammates
• Travel to customer sites approximately 30% of the time for hands‑on deployment and support
• This position is 100% in‑person, you must be able to come on‑site to our San Francisco office. We do not offer hybrid roles at Medra. We do offer relocation benefits for applicants that need to relocate.

Skills

Software engineering fundamentals

Systems thinking

Customer-facing engineering

Clear written and verbal communication

Willingness to work with physicals

Job description

Medra is developing a Physical AI Scientist platform that can operate scientific instruments with human‑level dexterity, analyze results, reason about next steps, and autonomously close the loop. We seek a role that acts as a technical co‑founder, delivering high‑impact customer projects and shaping the roadmap for solving our customers' critical scientific challenges.

The ideal candidate owns end‑to‑end delivery, translates workflows into technical requirements, and integrates robots,