Senior Embedded Field Reliability Engineer

About the role

Our installed fleet is growing faster than our next-generation design can ship. The first-generation hardware has known electrical and integration limitations that show up in the field, and our core embedded team is focused on the long-term redesign.

We’re looking for a Senior Embedded Field Reliability Engineer to own the health of today’s installed units. Your mission: keep every deployed scanner alive and recoverable, reduce customer-facing issues, and feed real field data into the redesign. This is a sustaining role for someone who gets satisfaction from keeping an imperfect product working brilliantly in the field - not from starting over on a clean sheet. You’ll partner closely with customer support and the embedded R&D team, and you’ll spend real time on-site with customers.

What you’ll do

• Build and run field failure tracking: categorize failures, rates and root causes across the installed base.
• Reproduce and root-cause intermittent field failures from logs, telemetry and scope traces.
• Ship recoverability fixes without a board respin - hardware and software watchdogs, safe-mode boot, remote reset paths, A/B firmware with automatic rollback.
• Instrument devices with fleet telemetry to catch failures early, and push fixes safely to deployed units via OTA.
• Design and validate low-cost retrofits (e.g. power control or filtering) that a field tech can install in under 30 minutes.
• Write runbooks so support can recover units without escalating to engineering.
• Give R&D a prioritized, well-researched list of design issues, backed by field data.
• Travel to customer sites to diagnose issues and work directly with dealer service managers and our support team.

What we’re looking for

• 7+ years of hands-on embedded engineering experience at senior or staff level.
• Field failure analysis: you’ve reproduced intermittent failures in deployed hardware, root-caused them, and run an RMA or failure-tracking process.
• Recovery engineering: watchdogs, bootloaders, A/B firmware partitions with automatic rollback, and remote reset.
• Board-level hardware debugging: power sequencing, brownouts, grounding and EMI, thermal issues, and camera interfaces such as USB, PoE or GigE. Proficient with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, multimeters, and reading schematics and datasheets.
• Fleet telemetry and OTA updates on deployed devices.
• Embedded Linux and production C/C++, plus Python for test and diagnostic tooling.
• Customer-facing comfort: happy to travel to sites and explain issues clearly to non-technical people.
• Pragmatic, data-driven mindset: you start with failure rates, logs and power topology, and you ship workarounds quickly under time pressure.

Nice to have

• Machine vision or multi-camera systems experience.
• You’ve designed a small retrofit board or field kit.
• Startup or small-team experience, comfortable without a big test lab.
• Automotive, dealership or industrial environment exposure.
• Experience using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) to iterate quickly.

What success looks like

• Field failures are tracked, categorized and quantified across the installed base.
• Recoverability fixes are live on deployed units without a board respin.
• Low-cost retrofits are validated and ready for field techs to install in under 30 minutes.
• Support can recover units using runbooks, without escalating to engineering.
• R&D has a prioritized, data-backed list of design issues for the next generation.

Salary band: $150-180k + equity

Diversity Commitment

At Tractable, we are committed to building a diverse team and inclusive workplace where people’s varied backgrounds and experiences are valued and recognised.