Robotics Release Engineer, System Validation
About The Position
FieldAI is hiring a Robotics Release Engineer for its Irvine team, which builds and tests embodied AI systems on real robots, sensors, and field deployments. This role plans and executes release validation across robot platforms, compute, firmware, and configurations. The engineer runs realistic autonomous missions on mobile robots, verifies release candidates and late fixes, and prepares clear evidence for release go/no-go decisions and customer-site handovers. The role also owns and maintains a versioned library of release test cases, creates reproducible Jira bug reports, and works with test automation and infrastructure engineers to turn manual scenarios into automated simulation and robot tests. The engineer is expected to improve release processes through checklists, templates, and retrospectives. The position is based in Irvine, California, and involves hands-on testing with physical robots.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of experience in QA, system testing, integration testing, or release validation for robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, industrial automation, or another hardware-software product.
- Experience planning and running structured test campaigns, including writing test plans, executing against acceptance criteria, tracking coverage, and reporting status to stakeholders.
- Comfort working hands-on with physical systems, including walking a robot through a building for hours, working on one's feet, and exercising safety awareness around moving machinery.
- Strong written communication skills for producing actionable bug reports and status updates.
- Fluency with Jira or a similar tracker and a disciplined bug lifecycle covering triage, severity, reproduction, verification, and closure.
- Comfort using Linux, a terminal, and SSH to install builds, retrieve logs, check processes, and run command-line tools.
- Working familiarity with Git, including checking out a branch or tag, reading a pull request, and comparing changes between builds.
- Sound judgment in distinguishing blockers from minor issues and confidence to report when a build is not ready.
- Reliability and ownership, including dependability on a fixed release calendar.
Nice To Haves
- Experience as a release manager, release coordinator, or QA lead responsible for a go/no-go decision.
- Robotics or autonomy domain knowledge, such as ROS, SLAM and localization, navigation, mission planning, LiDAR, or cameras.
- Experience validating software on a fleet across multiple robot platforms, firmware versions, configurations, or deployment paths.
- Scripting or test-automation experience, such as using Python or Bash to automate test steps, parse logs, or collect data.
- Experience with simulation-based testing or hardware-in-the-loop setups.
- Experience with test management tools such as Xray, TestRail, or Zephyr.
- Experience working alongside field or deployment engineers and customers.
- Background in a safety-critical or regulated domain.
Responsibilities
- Plan and execute release validation, including new-feature testing, end-to-end operational scenarios, and regression testing across robot platforms, compute, firmware, and configurations.
- Run end-to-end autonomous missions on mobile robots in a test facility, including setup, navigation, data capture, and recovery.
- Verify release candidates by installing builds, running regression tests, confirming hotfixes, and reporting status to the release team.
- Write reproducible bug reports in Jira with relevant datasets, logs, robot and build details, and reproduction steps.
- Own pass/fail evidence for go/no-go decisions, including pass and fail counts, deferred bugs, and known-issue lists.
- Prepare release handovers for engineers deploying at customer sites, explaining what was validated, what was not, and what to monitor.
- Confirm late fixes on the next release candidate before shipment.
- Build and maintain a curated, versioned release test-case library.
- Partner with test automation and infrastructure engineers to automate manually executed scenarios in simulation and on robots.
- Improve the release process through checklists, templates, and retrospectives.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
