Systems Test Engineer - Contract

Medra; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Medra in San Francisco seeks a Systems Test Engineer to be the front line of robot uptime at Medra Lab 001, monitoring daily protocol runs on-site, responding to issues in real time, and helping engineering prioritize improvements.

This high-impact role enables cutting-edge biological research. You will diagnose issues, document incidents, and collaborate with customer scientists to coordinate run schedules and system status.

Qualifications

• Background in robotics, automation, or mechatronics.
• Comfort around automation equipment — follow SOPs, troubleshoot hardware/software, escalate when needed.
• Strong written communication — filing incident reports and coordinating with software and hardware engineers.
• Detail-oriented with a proactive documentation habit and issue flagging.
• Willingness to be on-call or adjust schedules to support critical runs.

Responsibilities

• Maintain robot uptime and reliability across daily protocol runs, ensuring the system performs at peak efficiency
• Diagnose and resolve operational issues onsite using SOPs, playbooks, and your own intuition for the system
• Escalate complex issues to the engineering team with clear, structured incident reports including relevant metadata
• Monitor system health proactively using dashboards and alerting tools to catch issues before they cause production failures
• Perform routine calibration checks and preventive maintenance on the robot, peripherals, and consumables
• Document all incidents, resolutions, and observations to build a reliable knowledge base of site-specific issues and drive data-driven improvements
• Support remote and on-site engineering visits by assisting with hardware upgrades, validating software deployments, and performing test runs after changes
• Collaborate cross-functionally with customer scientists to coordinate run schedules and communicate system status

Skills

Robotics

Automation

Mechatronics

SOPs

Troubleshooting

Incident reports

Written communication

On-call readiness

Tools

Dashboards

Alerting systems

Observability

Job description

What We’re Building:

At Medra, our mission is to use AI, robotics, and biology to accelerate life science research, with the ultimate goal of eradicating disease. We have been quietly building the foundational layers of our Physical AI Scientist platform:

• Physical AI that can operate scientific instruments with human-level dexterity.
• Scientific AI that can analyze results, reason about next steps, and close the loop autonomously.

This is an incredibly ambitious mission, but we believe that a team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things.

The Team:

• We're a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers and scientists from companies like Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, and Neuralink. We're collaborative and love moving fast, both with our product and on team trips skiing or go-karting!
• As a team, we love nerding out about engineering and robotics — plus other topics like race cars or cooking. We like learning new things and then sharing our new knowledge with each other.
• Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don't mind intense discussions about design tradeoffs. If we have arguments or miscommunication, we resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically.

The Role:

We're looking for a Systems Test Engineer to be our front line of robot uptime at Medra Lab 001. You'll work on-site to monitor daily protocol runs, respond to issues in real time, keep the system running smoothly and help engineering team prioritize and ship improvements.

This is a high-impact role where your reliability directly enables cutting-edge biological research.

In this role, you will:

• Maintain robot uptime and reliability across daily protocol runs, ensuring the system performs at peak efficiency
• Diagnose and resolve operational issues onsite using SOPs, playbooks, and your own intuition for the system
• Escalate complex issues to the engineering team with clear, structured incident reports including relevant metadata
• Monitor system health proactively using dashboards and alerting tools to catch issues before they cause production failures
• Perform routine calibration checks and preventive maintenance on the robot, peripherals, and consumables
• Document all incidents, resolutions, and observations to build a reliable knowledge base of site-specific issues and drive data-driven improvements over time
• Support remote and on-site engineering visits by assisting with hardware upgrades, validating software deployments, and performing test runs after changes
• Collaborate cross-functionally with customer scientists to coordinate run schedules and communicate system status

Let's talk if you have:

• Background in robotics, automation, or mechatronics
• Comfort around automation equipment — you should be able to follow SOPs, troubleshoot basic hardware/software issues, and know when to elevate
• Strong written communication — you'll be filing incident reports and coordinating with software and hardware engineers daily
• A dependable, detail-oriented approach with a bias toward documenting what you see and proactively flagging potential issues
• Willingness to be on-call or adjust schedule to support critical customer runs when needed

(OPTIONAL) Bonus points if you have:

• Familiarity with life science lab equipment
• Experience with observability or monitoring tools (dashboards, alerting systems, log analysis)
• 1+ years of experience in a manufacturing support, field engineering, QA, or production support roles

Medra is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. We value diversity at Medra and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech.