Principal Robotics Systems Engineer

Mayo Clinic • Rochester, MN

4d

About The Position

Mayo Clinic’s enterprise robotics environment includes clinical and surgical robotics as well as service and mobile robotics for logistics, transport, environmental services, and patient-facing applications. These systems are delivered through multi-vendor fleets and rely on shared connectivity, data, security, and standards. The environment is evolving from sensor-driven, deterministic robots toward AI-driven autonomous systems.

The Principal Robotics Systems Engineer is the most senior individual contributor focused on integration and platforms. The role exercises broad technical authority across multiple enterprise-critical robotics initiatives, sets engineering direction for enterprise fleet observability, cross-vendor orchestration, and multi-vendor interoperability at enterprise scale, and serves as the definitive technical resource for the most difficult systems problems. Working closely with enterprise architects who own the enterprise reference architecture and standards, the principal translates that architecture into practical, scaled engineering across initiatives without owning the enterprise architecture itself.

This is an individual-contributor role with no direct reports. It provides broad functional and technical leadership while modeling stewardship and integrity and developing others in service of patients, staff, and the organization.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, systems engineering, mechatronics, or a related field.
• Ten or more years of progressively responsible relevant experience, including demonstrated technical leadership of complex implementations.
• Extensive demonstrated authority in multi-vendor robotics integration, interoperability standards, and fleet or platform engineering at enterprise scale.
• Track record setting technical direction for interoperability, orchestration, and observability platforms.
• Deep expertise in interoperability standards and frameworks such as VDA 5050, Open-RMF, and OPC UA, and healthcare data standards such as HL7, including FHIR.
• Expertise in cybersecurity frameworks for connected medical and operational technology, such as ISA/IEC 62443 and IEC 81001-5-1; working knowledge of FDA premarket cybersecurity guidance and ANSI/AAMI SW96 for vendor evaluation.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives in healthcare or comparable regulated settings.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s or doctoral degree in a related field.
• Advanced vendor-platform, safety, security, or architecture certification.
• Significant experience architecting, developing, and operating production robotics, autonomous systems, IoT, edge-computing, or other distributed cyber-physical systems.
• Experience with ROS/ROS 2 and integration of heterogeneous robotic platforms, fleet-management systems, and vendor APIs.
• Experience designing scalable distributed systems and integration architectures using REST/gRPC APIs, event-driven architectures, message brokers, MQTT, Kafka, or related technologies.
• Experience with cloud-native and edge technologies, including containers, Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Experience designing fleet observability and operational telemetry solutions using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, ELK/OpenSearch, or similar platforms.
• Experience with deployment, configuration management, CI/CD, remote software updates, and lifecycle management of distributed physical devices or robotic fleets.
• Experience integrating multi-vendor robotic or autonomous systems and familiarity with robotics interoperability frameworks or standards such as Open-RMF, VDA 5050, MassRobotics AMR Interoperability, or related approaches.
• Experience designing resilient systems that account for intermittent connectivity, device failures, cybersecurity, identity, networking, and edge/cloud operation.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead or senior individual contributor for complex, enterprise-scale platform or systems-integration initiatives, preferably involving robotics, autonomous systems, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, or other mission-critical environments.

Responsibilities

• Set engineering direction for enterprise fleet observability, cross-vendor orchestration, and multi-vendor interoperability at enterprise scale.
• Serve as the definitive technical resource for the most challenging systems problems across enterprise-critical robotics initiatives.
• Translate enterprise reference architecture and standards into concrete, scaled engineering solutions in partnership with enterprise architects.
• Provide broad functional and technical leadership across complex robotics integration and platform initiatives.
• Model stewardship and integrity and contribute to developing others.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal