Systems Test Engineer

ABOUT MEDRA

Medra's mission is to use AI, robotics, and biology to accelerate life science research, with the ultimate goal of eradicating disease. The team has been building the foundational layers of a Physical AI Scientist platform: 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 team comes from companies including Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, and Neuralink. They are collaborative, mission-driven, and move fast — both on their product and together as a team.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Medra is looking for a Systems Test Engineer to be the front line of robot uptime at Medra Lab 001. You will work on-site to monitor daily protocol runs, respond to issues in real time, keep the system running smoothly, and help the engineering team prioritize and ship improvements. This is a high-impact role where your reliability directly enables cutting-edge biological research.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Run scheduled experiments, monitor automated runs in progress, and keep the platform loaded, supplied, and productive so it never sits idle

- Operate liquid handlers, magnetic particle processors, and plate-based workstations: load decks, launch methods, and recover from routine errors

- Maintain robot uptime and reliability across daily protocol runs, ensuring the system performs at peak efficiency

- Diagnose and resolve operational issues on-site 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

YOU SHOULD HAVE

- Background in robotics, computer science, automation, or mechatronics

- Comfort around automation equipment, including the ability to follow SOPs, troubleshoot basic hardware and software issues, and know when to escalate

- Strong written communication skills; you will 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

- Availability to work night and/or weekend shifts on a regular basis

- Willingness to be on-call or adjust schedule to support critical customer runs when needed

NICE TO HAVE

- Familiarity with life science lab equipment

- Experience with observability or monitoring tools such as dashboards, alerting systems, or log analysis

- 1+ years of experience in manufacturing support, field engineering, QA, or production support roles

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

Base Salary: $100,000 - $180,000 annually