Systems Test Engineer

Medra • Boston, MA

9h • Onsite

About The Position

We're looking for a Systems Test Engineer (5 month contract) to be our front line of robot uptime at a customer site in Boston. You'll work on-site to monitor daily protocol runs, respond to issues in real time, keep the system running smoothly and help engineering team prioritize and ship improvements. This is a high-impact role where your reliability directly enables cutting-edge biological research. You'll work independently on-site while staying tightly connected to Medra's engineering team (in San Francisco) via Slack and our observability tooling. Medra is building Physical AI Scientists: robotic systems that work hand-in-hand with leading biopharma partners to enable scientific breakthroughs faster than ever before. This involves Physical AI that can operate scientific instruments with human-level dexterity and Scientific AI that can analyze results, reason about next steps, and close the loop autonomously. The company shipped its first production system over a year ago, recently raised a $52M Series A, and is opening one of the largest autonomous labs in the US. The team is small, ambitious, passionate, and mission-driven, with engineers from companies like Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, and Neuralink. They are collaborative, fast-moving, enjoy discussing engineering and robotics, and resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically.

Requirements

• Background in robotics, automation, or mechatronics
• 2+ years of experience in a manufacturing support, field engineering, QA, or production support roles
• Comfort around automation equipment — you should be able to follow SOPs, troubleshoot basic hardware/software issues, and know when to escalate
• Strong written communication — you'll be filing incident reports and coordinating with software and hardware engineers daily
• A dependable, detail-oriented approach with a bias toward documenting what you see and proactively flagging potential issues
• Willingness to be on-call or adjust schedule to support critical customer runs when needed

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with life science lab equipment
• Experience with observability or monitoring tools (dashboards, alerting systems, log analysis)

Responsibilities

• Maintain robot uptime and reliability across daily protocol runs, ensuring the system performs at peak efficiency
• Diagnose and resolve operational issues onsite using SOPs, playbooks, and your own intuition for the system
• Escalate complex issues to the engineering team with clear, structured incident reports including relevant metadata
• Monitor system health proactively using dashboards and alerting tools to catch issues before they cause production failures
• Perform routine calibration checks and preventive maintenance on the robot, peripherals, and consumables
• Document all incidents, resolutions, and observations to build a reliable knowledge base of site-specific issues and drive data-driven improvements over time
• Support remote and on-site engineering visits by assisting with hardware upgrades, validating software deployments, and performing test runs after changes
• Collaborate cross-functionally with customer scientists to coordinate run schedules and communicate system status

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed