Systems Test Engineer

We're looking for a Systems Test Engineer (5 month contract) to be our front line of robot uptime at a customer site in Boston. 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. You'll work independently on-site while staying tightly connected to Medra's engineering team (in San Francisco) via Slack and our observability tooling.

Medra is building Physical AI Scientists: robotic systems that work hand-in-hand with leading biopharma partners to enable scientific breakthroughs faster than ever before.

🤖 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.

We shipped our first production system over a year ago, recently raised a $52M Series A, and are opening one of the largest autonomous labs in the US. We're a small and ambitious team.

• We're a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers 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.
  

• 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

• Background in robotics, automation, or mechatronics

• 2+ years of experience in a manufacturing support, field engineering, QA, or production support roles

• Comfort around automation equipment — you should be able to follow SOPs, troubleshoot basic hardware/software issues, and know when to escalate

• 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

• Familiarity with life science lab equipment

• Experience with observability or monitoring tools (dashboards, alerting systems, log analysis)