Principal Autonomous Test Engineer

Principal Autonomous Test Systems Engineer

Location: Remote (US) * Periodic visits to our Integrated Testing Center in Wilmington, MA

Symbotic builds AI-powered robotic systems that automate the warehouse. Behind every system we ship is a test organization running real robots, rigs, and instrumentation at fleet scale. Today, that test data lives across teams, formats, and tools. We're hiring a principal engineer to bring it together: one pipeline, one schema, one automation framework, and dashboards our executive team reads every week.

This is a greenfield role. You'll define the architecture, not inherit it.

What you'll do

• Build executive test dashboards our leadership uses to see the true state of testing across the company, without anyone assembling it by hand.
• Design and own one versioned test data schema used by every test team, with pipelines from test rigs, DAQ, automated runs, and manual campaigns.
• Architect the shared automation framework every test team builds on: orchestration, sequencing, result capture, and CI/CD.
• Bring physical test environments-including rigs, fixtures, instrumentation, and hardware in the loop-into automated, end-to-end system integration testing.
• Drive adoption with reference implementations, docs, and hands-on enablement.
• Equip our reliability team with the clean, traceable data they need to model how our systems age and wear.
• Set the roadmap, make build vs. buy calls, and mentor senior engineers, growing into leading a small team of technical leads.

What you bring

• 12+ years in test automation, test infrastructure, or data platform engineering for physical, electromechanical, or robotic systems.
• A track record of adoption: A platform you built that teams outside your own adopted. (Tell us how many teams used it and how you got them there.
• Hardware expertise: Hands-on time with real hardware: DAQ, sensors, test rigs, HIL, and system integration.
• Data fluency: Test or telemetry data modeling, time series data, and dashboards that non-engineers actually use.
• Technical stack: Strong Go and/or Python, CI/CD, containers, AWS, and API design.
• Education: A Master's degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.

Bonus points

• You've architected platforms in Go.
• You've worked alongside reliability engineers on life or degradation modeling.

Why you'll like it here

• Greenfield: One platform for the whole test organization, defined entirely by you.
• Visibility: Your first deliverable is read directly by executive staff.
• Authority without overhead: You set the standards and interfaces every test team builds against.
• Real hardware at scale: Robotics test data at a scale most platform roles never touch.
• Flexibility: Remote, with lab time at our Integrated Testing Center only when the work calls for it.

Our environment

• This is a remote position based in the United States, with periodic onsite work at the Integrated Testing Center (ITC) in Wilmington, MA, for rig and instrumentation integration.
• Less than 5% of travel may be required. Employees must have a valid driver's license and the ability to drive and/or fly to the ITC and other company locations.
• The employee is responsible for owning a credit card and managing expenses personally to be reimbursed on a bi-weekly basis.