Sustaining Engineering Manager, Robotics

We believe robots are the biggest lever we have to making the physical world a better, more affordable place. But robots are a rounding error in our society: nearly nine out of ten American factories and warehouses don’t even have a single robot, and robots have yet to make their way into our homes or places of business.

Tutor Intelligence is changing that.

Tutor is a robotics research and deployment company, building generally capable robot hardware and artificial intelligence to enable robots to go where no robots have gone before. Sonny is a semi-humanoid robot with frontier dexterity approaching the human form. Cassie does back-breaking work, moving boxes, pallets, and bulk goods for businesses from family-owned manufacturers to some of the largest brands in the world. Tutor robots are manufactured at scale and operate as a network, combining the whole fleet’s learned experience to train ever more capable robot artificial intelligence.

Founded at MIT and headquartered in Watertown, MA, our team is full stack: we design and manufacture robot hardware, train our own models, work directly with the smallest and largest end-customers, and maintain our fleet across the United States. We’re a team of researchers, engineers, technicians, operators, and sellers who love building things and solving hard problems.

Our mission is grand: robots everywhere, for the common good, raising the standard of living across North America, and then the world.

Whether you’re designing robots, closing deals, running deployments, or creating the processes that help us scale, your work doesn’t sit on a shelf. It shows up on real production floors, making physical work safer and more affordable.

Our team of 160+ is driven by curiosity and a genuine love of building. Everyone here takes real ownership, learns fast, and holds a high bar while having each other’s backs. If you love hard problems and creating things that didn’t exist before, you’ll fit right in.

Tutor builds robots and runs them in customers' facilities across the country. Once a robot ships, it has to keep working for years, through packaging changes, worn parts, new sites, and software that keeps moving underneath it. We are hiring a Sustaining Engineering Manager to own that.

Your team owns the shipping robots as engineering products: the hardware and the software. When a failure shows up in the field, the team finds the root cause, designs the fix, proves it, and gets it onto every robot that needs it, whether that means a part change, a procedure, a firmware release, or a software change. The team also builds the instrumentation and tools that find problems before customers do, and works alongside the field support engineers who see the robots every day.

The team writes code, takes apart hardware, and talks to customers directly.

Along with a résumé, tell us about a failure in a shipping product that you chased to root cause, and what you changed so it would not come back.

At Tutor, we believe great engineers and researchers are defined by what they build and the impact they have — not where they sit in an org chart or what title they have. Therefore, everyone in our R&D org holds the title Member of Technical Staff (MoTS). Our job postings use standard titles so you can find us, but if you join Tutor, you'll be a MoTS — with a level that is determined through the interview process.

That also means we hire people, not slots. Work at Tutor evolves every quarter, and we set the expectation of flexibility from day one — it's common for people to start on one thing and shift to another based on where the team needs them most. A high technical bar across the board is what makes that flexibility possible: it's what allows people to contribute meaningfully whatever problem they take on.

The base salary range for this role is $190,000 to $300,000, depending on experience.

As Tutor grows, so will our benefits. We’re continuing to invest in ways to support our team at work and beyond.