Senior Robotics Platform Engineer

Burro; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 110,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/dental/vision insurance

Equity

401K Plan

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Burro is seeking a Senior Robotics Platform Engineer to own the full lifecycle of how our field robots are built, provisioned, tested, and updated. This role anchors scaling bare-metal Linux environments and automated deployment across a fleet of autonomous machines in demanding outdoor settings.

You will drive end-to-end provisioning, imaging thousands of devices, and build the tooling that enables engineering, manufacturing, and support teams to operate with speed and confidence.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in CS/EE/Robotics or related field.
• 5+ years building and operating infrastructure for hardware at scale (robotics, autonomous vehicles, or IoT).
• Experience designing provisioning/imaging pipelines for hundreds to thousands of devices.
• Strong Linux administration, kernel/configs, networking, storage, and hardware interfaces.
• Proficiency with containerization and image management at OS level.
• Scripting in Bash and Python for automation.
• Experience with end-of-line or hardware acceptance test systems.
• Ability to collaborate across engineering, manufacturing, and support teams.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end provisioning pipeline from bare-metal OS imaging to hardware configuration and pre-shipment validation.
• Own provisioning for robot peripherals and embedded subsystems.
• Develop EOL test frameworks with pass/fail logging and diagnostics.
• Collaborate with manufacturing to ensure robust, repeatable tooling.
• Develop tooling to diagnose, repair, and re-provision units in the field with minimal downtime.
• Work with R&D to deploy new hardware and features in production.
• Build monitoring/logging for provisioning pipelines with fleet-level dashboards.

Skills

Linux systems administration

Containerization (Docker/Podman)

Scripting (Bash and Python)

Provisioning/Imaging pipelines

Hardware deployment at scale

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or related field

Tools

Docker

Podman

Ansible (nice-to-have)

Job description

About Burro

Burro is the leading robotics company in the world by number of robots working outdoors in the field with real customers. Our mission is to free people from tedious work and solve the critical labor shortages faced by farmers and others that work outdoors.

To accomplish our mission, we need a world-class, diverse team where everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas. With this in mind, we strive to create a work environment where every employee can be themselves and express their perspective – this enables us to deliver the most creative and innovative solutions to problems our customers face.

Headquartered in Philadelphia with an office in central California, and backed by top Agtech and autonomy investors, including S2G, Catalyst, Translink, Cibus, FPrime, Toyota Ventures, FFVC, Xplorer, and Radicle, Burro was created to solve the labor shortages facing farmers using robotics.

Burros can be described as Disney's Wall-E for agriculture and work outdoors, in a 1.0 format. They function, today, as computer vision based autonomous ground vehicles for carrying, towing, and scouting, and are designed to lay the base for the fully autonomous future of work outdoors. We have a growing triple digit fleet deployed in paid commercial use within vineyards, nurseries, berries, and beyond, and demand for our product is accelerating, so we are growing our team.

About The Role

We are looking for a Senior Robotics Platform Engineer to own the full lifecycle of how our robots are built, provisioned, tested, and updated in the field. This is not a cloud DevOps role; this is a systems infrastructure role rooted in scaling bare-metal Linux environments, and the operational complexity of deploying software to a fleet of autonomous machines in demanding conditions.

You will take us from a largely manual, labor-intensive provisioning process to a reliable, scalable, automated, and instrumented pipeline. You will own end-of-line testing, system imaging, hardware bring-up, and the tooling that makes our engineering and support teams faster and more confident.

The ideal candidate has built and scaled provisioning systems before, whether for robots, medical devices, automotive systems, industrial IoT, or large-scale enterprise hardware deployments. You understand what it means to image thousands of devices reliably, catch failures before they reach the field, and build infrastructure that manufacturing and support teams can actually use.

You will design solutions for the correct scale: avoiding the complexity of a solution that scales to millions, opting for the development speed of a solution that scales to thousands. You are comfortable operating in a system that is actively bootstrapping itself; building or avoiding the infrastructure that would already exist at a larger company.

Responsibilities

• Design and own the end-to-end provisioning pipeline: from bare-metal OS imaging through hardware configuration, software installation, calibration, and pre-shipment validation.
• Own provisioning for all robot hardware peripherals: depth cameras, LiDAR and GPS sensors, motor drivers, networking, and other embedded subsystems.
• Develop end-of-line (EOL) test frameworks and reporting infrastructure, including pass/fail logging, failure diagnostics, and traceability per unit.
• Collaborate with manufacturing to ensure provisioning tooling is robust, repeatable, and operator-friendly.
• Support our growing fleet of robots working in real-world environments by developing tooling and runbooks to diagnose, repair, and re-provision units in the field with minimal downtime.
• Work with R&D to commercialize and deploy new hardware and features reliability in production
• Build monitoring and logging infrastructure for the provisioning pipeline and runtime environments, to be integrated with dashboards and alerting for fleet-level health.
• Document all systems, processes, and runbooks

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field required. We strongly weigh practical, demonstrable experience over academic credentials; candidates with equivalent industry experience building and shipping hardware systems at scale are encouraged to apply.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating infrastructure for hardware at scale: robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical devices, industrial IoT, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated experience building provisioning or imaging pipelines for large numbers of physical devices (hundreds to thousands).
• Strong Linux systems administration: kernel configuration, systemd, networking, storage, package management, hardware interfaces.
• Proficiency with containerization: Docker and/or Podman, container runtime configuration, and image management at the OS level.
• Scripting and automation fluency in Bash and Python.
• Experience building or operating end-of-line or hardware acceptance test systems.
• Ability to work effectively across engineering, manufacturing, and support, and communicate clearly in each context.

Nice-To-Haves

• Experience with A/B or partition-based update systems and rollback strategies on embedded or edge Linux devices.
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible for device fleet configuration and runbook automation in an embedded/edge context.
• Experience with Balena or similar container-based embedded fleet management and delta update systems.
• Familiarity with ROS, CAN bus, motor controllers, or other robotics-adjacent hardware and software interfaces.
• Familiarity with custom Linux images, RT kernel configuration, latency tuning, or other hardened/minimal Linux distributions for embedded deployment and understanding of the tradeoffs involved.

Perks

• Competitive salary and benefits package (medical/dental/vision/life insurance)
• Equity
• 401K Plan
• Unlimited PTO
• Paid parental leave

$110,000 - $130,000 a year