Senior Embedded Field Reliability Engineer

Tractable; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Job summary

Tractable is seeking a Senior Embedded Field Reliability Engineer to own the health of our installed LumaScanner fleet. You will investigate field failures, reproduce intermittent issues, and deploy recoverability fixes while collaborating with customer support and R&D.

This role involves hands-on hardware/software work and on-site customer travel. You will design low-cost retrofits, instrument telemetry, and push safe fixes via OTA, ensuring deployments remain reliable and scalable.

Qualifications

• 7+ years hands-on embedded engineering experience.
• Field failure analysis experience: reproduce and root-cause failures in deployed hardware.
• Recovery engineering with watchdogs, bootloaders, and firmware rollback processes.
• Board-level hardware debugging: power sequencing, EMI, thermal issues, and camera interfaces such as USB/PoE/GigE.
• Fleet telemetry and OTA updates experience.
• Embedded Linux and production C/C++, plus Python for tooling.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites and explain issues clearly.

Responsibilities

• Build and run field failure tracking; categorize failures, rates and root causes across the installed base.
• Reproduce and root-cause intermittent field failures from logs, telemetry and scope traces.
• Ship recoverability fixes without a board respin — hardware and software watchdogs, safe-mode boot, remote reset paths, A/B firmware with automatic rollback.
• Instrument devices with fleet telemetry and push fixes via OTA to deployed units.
• Design and validate low-cost retrofits that a field tech can install in under 30 minutes.
• Write runbooks so support can recover units without escalating to engineering.
• Provide R&D with prioritized, data-backed design issues from field data.
• Travel to customer sites to diagnose issues and work with dealers and support.

Skills

Embedded engineering

Field failure analysis

Recovery engineering

Embedded Linux

C/C++

Python

Customer-facing

Data-driven

Tools

Oscilloscopes

Logic analyzers

Multimeters

Schematic reading

Datasheets

Job description

Why Tractable?

We combine world-class AI research with real-world applications that make a difference. At Tractable, you’ll collaborate with brilliant minds, work on transformative projects, and contribute to technology that helps people when they need it most.

Tractable is a leader in AI for auto repair and insurance, backed by SoftBank, Insight Partners, and Georgian. LumaScanner is our hardware-plus-SaaS vehicle scanning system: a drive-through scanner installed at dealerships, collision shops and insurer sites that pushes vehicle damage assessment toward real-time AI identification and repair estimation.

LumaScanner started as a small, scrappy project and is fast becoming a major revenue line. Our Salt Lake City team designs, builds and supports it - hands-on work, close to the hardware, with startup pace and real ownership, backed by the data and funding of a company that has already proven the model at scale.

About the role

Our installed fleet is growing faster than our next-generation design can ship. The first-generation hardware has known electrical and integration limitations that show up in the field, and our core embedded team is focused on the long-term redesign.

We’re looking for a Senior Embedded Field Reliability Engineer to own the health of today’s installed units. Your mission: keep every deployed scanner alive and recoverable, reduce customer-facing issues, and feed real field data into the redesign. This is a sustaining role for someone who gets satisfaction from keeping an imperfect product working brilliantly in the field - not from starting over on a clean sheet. You’ll partner closely with customer support and the embedded R&D team, and you’ll spend real time on-site with customers.

What you’ll do

• Build and run field failure tracking: categorize failures, rates and root causes across the installed base.

• Reproduce and root-cause intermittent field failures from logs, telemetry and scope traces.

• Ship recoverability fixes without a board respin — hardware and software watchdogs, safe-mode boot, remote reset paths, A/B firmware with automatic rollback.

• Instrument devices with fleet telemetry to catch failures early, and push fixes safely to deployed units via OTA.

• Design and validate low-cost retrofits (e.g. power control or filtering) that a field tech can install in under 30 minutes.

• Write runbooks so support can recover units without escalating to engineering.

• Give R&D a prioritized, well-researched list of design issues, backed by field data.

• Travel to customer sites to diagnose issues and work directly with dealer service managers and our support team.

What we’re looking for

• 7+ years of hands-on embedded engineering experience at senior or staff level.

• Field failure analysis: you’ve reproduced intermittent failures in deployed hardware, root-caused them, and run an RMA or failure-tracking process.

• Recovery engineering: watchdogs, bootloaders, A/B firmware partitions with automatic rollback, and remote reset.

• Board-level hardware debugging: power sequencing, brownouts, grounding and EMI, thermal issues, and camera interfaces such as USB, PoE or GigE. Proficient with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, multimeters, and reading schematics and datasheets.

• Fleet telemetry and OTA updates on deployed devices.

• Embedded Linux and production C/C++, plus Python for test and diagnostic tooling.

• Customer-facing comfort: happy to travel to sites and explain issues clearly to non-technical people.

• Pragmatic, data-driven mindset: you start with failure rates, logs and power topology, and you ship workarounds quickly under time pressure.

Nice to have

• Machine vision or multi-camera systems experience.

• You’ve designed a small retrofit board or field kit.

• Startup or small-team experience, comfortable without a big test lab.

• Automotive, dealership or industrial environment exposure.

• Experience using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) to iterate quickly.

What success looks like

• Field failures are tracked, categorized and quantified across the installed base.

• Recoverability fixes are live on deployed units without a board respin.

• Low-cost retrofits are validated and ready for field techs to install in under 30 minutes.

• Support can recover units using runbooks, without escalating to engineering.

• R&D has a prioritized, data-backed list of design issues for the next generation.

Salary band: $150-180k + equity

Diversity commitment

At Tractable, we are committed to building a diverse team and inclusive workplace where people’s varied backgrounds and experiences are valued and recognised.

We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds and offer equal opportunities without discrimination.