Staff Automation Engineer

SPAN; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation with equity grants

100% employee premiums for medical, dental, vision

Flexible hours and time off

Team building events and social activities

Job summary

SPAN is seeking a Staff Automation Engineer based in San Francisco, California. In this pivotal role, you will enhance product quality and reliability through automated testing and work alongside various engineering teams.

Your responsibilities include designing test automation infrastructure, diagnosing test failures, and managing a fleet of hardware test rigs. The ideal candidate has proficiency in Python and experience with CI/CD structures that involve physical hardware. You will also receive competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to build reliable automation tools and services.
• Experience with hardware and software integration.
• Strong CI/CD operations experience in physical environments.

Responsibilities

• Design test automation infrastructure with partner teams.
• Diagnose automated test failures across multiple domains.
• Manage a fleet of hardware test rigs.

Skills

Proficiency in Python

Reading C++, Rust, TypeScript

Experience with hardware-adjacent software

CI/CD pipeline operations

Tooling development from scratch

Tools

Ansible

Job description

The Role

As a Staff Automation Engineer, you’ll play a crucial role in ensuring the quality and reliability of our products through a combination of automated and manual testing methodologies. This is a high impact role that will work closely with SPAN’s internal Software, Device Software, Hardware Engineering, Systems, and QA teams.

Role & Responsibilities

As a Staff Automation Engineer, you will be expected to:

• Co-design test automation infrastructure with Systems and Test Infrastructure. Automation provides the platform and drivers; partner teams write the tests.
• Diagnose automated test failures across firmware, hardware, and test infrastructure.
• Help manage and grow a fleet of 50+ hardware test rigs across offices.
• Monitor hardware and software infrastructure health.

You will take architectural ownership of one or more of the team's critical systems. Examples of where you might focus:

• Hardware-in-the-loop test execution: on-premise orchestration of test sequences on physical hardware, integrated into CI/CD for PR gating and release qualification.
• Test data pipeline: telemetry ingestion from rigs, structured storage in PostgreSQL, reporting dashboards for release readiness and reliability.
• Test execution framework: instrument driver library, sequence engine, and the gRPC services that tie rigs together.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrable proficiency building reliable tools and services in Python.
• Able to read and reason about C++, Rust, TypeScript, or similar. Not your daily language, but enough to follow a bug across a boundary.
• Experience with hardware-adjacent software: software that controls, monitors, or ingests data from physical devices or instruments.
• Experience owning internal platform infrastructure where your users are other engineers and your systems are in the critical path.
• Comfortable standing up new tooling from scratch and retiring it when needs change.
• Experience operating CI/CD infrastructure, particularly pipelines that run on physical hardware.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience working in a startup environment.
• Experience working in the renewable energy industry.
• Experience with Ansible or similar configuration management for physical infrastructure.
• Experience with or preference for a rapid or continuous release cadence.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation + equity grants at a well‑funded, venture‑backed company.
• Comprehensive benefits: 100% employee premiums for base plans on medical, dental, vision with options for additional coverage; parental leave up to 24 weeks depending on eligibility.
• Comfortable, sunny office space located near BART and Caltrain public transit.
• Strong focus on team building and company culture: Employee Resource Groups, monthly social events, recognition breakfasts, lunches, and learn sessions.
• Flexible hours, one holiday per month, and flexible time off.