Hardware Test Engineer, Robotics

TAR•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

As a Hardware Test Engineer for the robotics program, you stand up the test function from zero and own it: the rigs, the instrumentation, the test plans, and the reliability data that decides whether a robot is ready to leave the shop. You design and build fixtures yourself, end to end, and own every failure from first appearance to proven fix. This is a hands-on role for an experienced engineer at our San Francisco robotics facility, with travel to our West Texas site for field testing.

Requirements

4+ years in hardware test, validation, or reliability engineering on robotic, vehicle, or electromechanical systems.
Track record designing and building your own test rigs and fixtures, with the CAD and GD&T fluency to do it, not just running someone else’s.
Instrumentation and DAQ depth: load cells, strain gauges, thermocouples, accelerometers, and the setup techniques that make a measurement trustworthy.
Strong mechanical engineering fundamentals and structured root cause methods (8D, 5-Why, teardown, or equivalent) that go past reporting a failure to correcting it.
Accelerated life and durability test experience.
Python or equivalent scripting for test automation and data analysis.
Judgment to know when a scrappy rig is good enough and when to build the real thing, with high ownership, a bias for speed, and comfort with ambiguity.

Nice To Haves

Experience standing up a test function from zero.
Reliability statistics (Weibull, MTBF, sample sizing, confidence intervals) and tools such as Weibull++ or JMP.
Structural static and fatigue testing.
Field test and commissioning experience on outdoor or heavy equipment.

Responsibilities

Design and build the test harnesses, rigs, and fixtures required to test robotic systems from the subsystem level through a production representative design.
Turn requirements and design constraints into executable test plans covering functional, durability, accelerated life, and environmental testing, with SOPs that let others run tests in parallel without you.
Instrument machines and rigs with load cells, strain gauges, thermocouples, accelerometers, and encoders, and own the DAQ and data pipeline behind them.
Run environmental testing to characterize the limits of the design: high temperature, thermal cycling, dust and particulate ingress, vibration, shock, humidity, and UV exposure.
Own root cause end to end: reproduce the failure, isolate it, and work with the design team to implement and validate the fix.
Build reliability models from test and field data, including life estimates, failure distributions, and the sample sizes needed to trust them.
Automate test execution, reporting, and dashboards so the team knows what is actually breaking and how often.
Qualify machines for field deployment and work cross-functionally to design end-of-line acceptance tests as the fleet grows.