Robotics Test Engineer — Automation, HIL & Regression

Neuralink; Austin, South San Francisco (TX, CA); On-site; USD 151,000 - 281,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Paid Holidays

Meals Provided

Equity RSUs

401(k) Plan

Parental Leave

Flexible Time Off

Job summary

Neuralink is seeking a hands-on robotics test engineer in Austin to build and run the next generation surgical robot test fleet. You will break robots into testable components, build rigs, and automate ALT to verify reliability and capture evidence for safe scaling.

You’ll collaborate with Sim and HIL teams, design fixtures, and develop repeatable regression tests that reveal failures and prevent wasted hardware time. Seniority helps, but exceptional ability matters most.

Qualifications

• Hands-on robotics experience. You’ve made a robot work, broken it, and made it work again.
• Enough Python to automate tests and analyze results, and a basic understanding of Rust.
• Hands-on experience with motor drives, encoders, sensors, and hardware interfaces such as Ethernet, SPI, I²C, UART, or EtherCAT.
• Comfortable reading schematics, building instrumented fixtures, and using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and data acquisition systems to diagnose failures.
• High agency on hardware, comfortable with noise, intermittent faults, and failures that resist reproduction.
• Discipline about repeatability, traceability, and recording what actually happened.
• Judgment to know when a robot is ready, and the diligence to bring the evidence to back it up.
• Effective at using AI agents to build tooling, analyze data and automate failure investigations.

Responsibilities

• Bring up, instrument, and run robots and component test rigs.
• Hunt failures across mechanics, electronics, firmware, and software.
• Automate routine robot V&V, test setup, execution, recovery, and results.
• Design and build fixtures, sensing, and logging, with safe operating procedures and fast turnaround.
• Work with Sim and HIL engineers to make the models and tests match reality.
• Turn real failures into repeatable regression tests so we stop burning hardware time on known bugs.

Skills

Robotics

Python

Rust

Tools

Motor drives

Encoders

Sensors

Ethernet

SPI

I²C

UART

EtherCAT

Job description

Neuralink is seeking a hands-on robotics test engineer in Austin to build and run the next generation surgical robot test fleet. You will break robots into testable components, build rigs, and automate ALT to verify reliability and capture evidence for safe scaling.

You’ll collaborate with Sim and HIL teams, design fixtures, and develop repeatable regression tests that reveal failures and prevent wasted hardware time. Seniority helps, but exceptional ability matters most.