Robotics Engineer - Lab Automation & AI Biotech

Xaira Therapeutics; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Base salary with bonus and equity

Mentorship and growth opportunities

Collaborative, interdisciplinary team

Job summary

Xaira Therapeutics is actively building a cutting-edge lab automation and robotics platform in the San Francisco area to transform how biological experiments are executed and scaled. As a Robotics Engineer, Lab Automation, you will translate manual workflows into robust robotic execution and work with biologists, automation engineers, software engineers, and robotics experts to accelerate discovery.

This hands-on role offers opportunities to grow into advanced robotics, autonomy, and AI-enabled

Qualifications

• Hands-on robotics system building, integration, and lab automation.
• Familiarity with hardware/software integration and debugging in real environments.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, C++, or C# with ROS2 and computer vision.

Responsibilities

• Build, integrate, and maintain robotics software for arms, mobile robots, sensors, grippers, and lab devices.
• Develop motion planning, perception, and safety logic for robotic systems in real lab environments.
• Integrate lab instruments via APIs, IoT interfaces, schedulers, and custom control software.
• Create task execution frameworks using state machines, behavior trees, planners, and recovery logic.
• Benchmark and integrate computer vision methods for object detection, segmentation, tracking, pose estimation, localization, and scene understanding.
• Create and use simulation or digital twin environments for validation, testing, data generation, and debugging.
• Collaborate with scientists to translate biological workflows into automated protocols.
• Support multi-station system integration, automated material handling, sample tracking, validation, logging, and error recovery.
• Work hands-on with physical hardware to debug real systems and improve reliability.
• Evaluate AI approaches (foundation models, RL, imitation learning) to improve lab execution.

Skills

Robotics

Python

C++

C#

ROS2

Computer vision

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's or Master’s degree in CS/Robotics/EE/ME

PhD candidates welcome

Tools

MoveIt

OpenCV

Gazebo

MuJoCo

Isaac Sim

Foxglove

Job description

Xaira Therapeutics is actively building a cutting-edge lab automation and robotics platform in the San Francisco area to transform how biological experiments are executed and scaled. As a Robotics Engineer, Lab Automation, you will translate manual workflows into robust robotic execution and work with biologists, automation engineers, software engineers, and robotics experts to accelerate discovery.

This hands-on role offers opportunities to grow into advanced robotics, autonomy, and AI-enabled