Robotics Infrastructure Engineer

DRH Search•Watertown, MA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

We're assisting a well-funded robotics startup in the industrial automation space with their search for Robotics Infrastructure Engineers. Their platform allows clients to utilize robotics as a service, increasing efficiency while keeping costs manageable. The role will work onsite in their Watertown, MA office 5 days a week.

Requirements

3+ years of Python in a systems context — not web/ML Python, but the kind where you deal with processes, hardware I/O, async, and real-time constraints.
Strong Linux systems knowledge: Memory management, device management, systemd, containers, networking, kernel tuning.
Infrastructure as code experience: Declarative infrastructure and configuration management tools. You've managed IAM, CI runners, secrets, and machine images programmatically.
Experience with real hardware: Robot arms, depth cameras, grippers, force/torque sensors, pneumatics, or similar.
CI/CD ownership: You've not just used CI — you've owned it. Runner infrastructure, flaky test triage, build caching, GPU-enabled pipelines.
Comfort with AI coding agents: You've used tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot Workspace, or similar to do real engineering work — not just autocomplete, but directing agents through multi-step debugging, refactoring, and infrastructure tasks. You understand their failure modes and know when to trust vs. verify.
Strong debugging instincts: You can go from a vague production symptom to root cause across hardware, OS, network, and application layers.
Bias toward shipping over perfecting: You fix, monitor, iterate. Your commit history has more fix: than feat: and you're proud of that.

Nice To Haves

NixOS or reproducible build system experience.
Experience building or operating autonomous engineering agents/bots.
Robotics simulation (kinematics, camera models, physics).
gRPC / Protocol Buffers.
Managed network infrastructure, VPNs, overlay networks.
Time-series databases and observability stacks.

Responsibilities

Maintain the on-robot codebase that orchestrates arms, cameras, sensors, and I/O.
Debug production hardware/software failures and ship fixes fast.
Manage cloud infrastructure — identity and access management, CI/CD credentials, secrets, container registries, cluster autoscaling — using declarative configuration and reproducible builds.
Own the transition of robot software packaging to reproducible, hermetic build systems.
Maintain machine images, dev environments, and deployment pipelines.
Develop end-to-end simulation systems that validate robot behavior without physical hardware — camera projection, kinematics, placement validation, fleet-wide calibration.
Build autonomous agents that run nightly CI triage, security audits, infrastructure compliance checks, and code quality sweeps.
Design the interfaces and instructions that make agents effective at real engineering work.
Instrument robot software with metrics and structured telemetry.
Build alerting that catches problems before humans notice them.
Touch frontend, backend, protobuf definitions, deployment tooling, and cloud services as needed.