Senior Robotics Platform Engineer

Burro•Philadelphia, PA

6d•Onsite

About The Position

Burro is seeking a Senior Robotics Platform Engineer to manage the entire lifecycle of robot construction, provisioning, testing, and field updates. This role focuses on scaling bare-metal Linux environments and managing the operational complexities of deploying software to autonomous machines in challenging conditions. The engineer will transition the company from a manual provisioning process to a reliable, scalable, automated, and instrumented pipeline. Key responsibilities include owning end-of-line testing, system imaging, hardware bring-up, and developing tools to enhance the efficiency and confidence of engineering and support teams. The ideal candidate will have prior experience building and scaling provisioning systems for hardware at scale, understanding the nuances of imaging thousands of devices, preventing field failures, and creating usable infrastructure for manufacturing and support teams. The role requires designing solutions appropriate for scaling to thousands of devices, not millions, and operating within a system that is actively bootstrapping itself.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field required. We strongly weigh practical, demonstrable experience over academic credentials; candidates with equivalent industry experience building and shipping hardware systems at scale are encouraged to apply.
5+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating infrastructure for hardware at scale: robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical devices, industrial IoT, or equivalent.
Demonstrated experience building provisioning or imaging pipelines for large numbers of physical devices (hundreds to thousands of units).
Strong Linux systems administration: kernel configuration, systemd, networking, storage, package management, hardware interfaces.
Proficiency with containerization: Docker and/or Podman, container runtime configuration, and image management at the OS level.
Scripting and automation fluency in Bash and Python.
Experience building or operating end-of-line or hardware acceptance test systems.
Ability to work effectively across engineering, manufacturing, and support, and communicate clearly in each context.

Nice To Haves

Experience with A/B or partition-based update systems and rollback strategies on embedded or edge Linux devices.
Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible for device fleet configuration and runbook automation in an embedded/edge context.
Experience with Balena or similar container-based embedded fleet management and delta update systems.
Familiarity with ROS, CAN bus, motor controllers, or other robotics-adjacent hardware and software interfaces.
Familiarity with custom Linux images, RT kernel configuration, latency tuning, or other hardened/minimal Linux distributions for embedded deployment and understanding of the tradeoffs involved.

Responsibilities

Design and own the end-to-end provisioning pipeline: from bare-metal OS imaging through hardware configuration, software installation, calibration, and pre-shipment validation.
Own provisioning for all robot hardware peripherals: depth cameras, LiDAR and GPS sensors, motor drivers, networking, and other embedded subsystems.
Develop end-of-line (EOL) test frameworks and reporting infrastructure, including pass/fail logging, failure diagnostics, and traceability per unit.
Collaborate with manufacturing to ensure provisioning tooling is robust, repeatable, and operator-friendly.
Support our growing fleet of robots working in real-world environments by developing tooling and runbooks to diagnose, repair, and re-provision units in the field with minimal downtime.
Work with R&D to commercialize and deploy new hardware and features reliability in production
Build monitoring and logging infrastructure for the provisioning pipeline and runtime environments, to be integrated with dashboards and alerting for fleet-level health.
Document all systems, processes, and runbooks