Senior Member of Technical Staff: Robotics Test and Release

Position Summary

You will own the process that turns a candidate build into a release we trust on real robots in the field. You'll qualify releases through rigorous testing on physical hardware, run the regression and validation that catches problems before they reach a deployed robot, and drive the release process end-to-end—using our delivery tooling to cut, validate, and promote releases.

This is a hands-on role centered on real robots: you'll spend your time making sure that what we ship actually works, in the lab and in the environments where our robots do real physical work, and you'll be the person the team relies on to say a release is ready.

Release Qualification

• Own the qualification of software releases—define what "ready to ship" means, run the process that validates candidate builds, and make the call on whether a release meets the bar.
• Release Process Ownership: Drive the release process end-to-end, using the team's delivery tooling to cut, validate, promote, and track releases through to deployed robots.
• Hardware Testing: Design and run tests on physical robots—functional, integration, performance, and safety-relevant testing on real hardware.
• Field & Deployment Validation: Validate releases in real deployment conditions, run regression against real-world scenarios, and catch regressions before they reach customers.
• Test Development: Build and maintain the test suites, scenarios, and fixtures needed to exercise the robot thoroughly and repeatably.
• Issue Triage & Quality Signal: Track down, characterize, and clearly communicate failures; own the quality signal that tells the team where the robot stands.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with robot software, controls, AI, and DevOps engineers to improve testability, coverage, and release quality across the stack.

Required Qualifications

• Test & Release Experience: Proven experience in test engineering, release engineering, or QA for complex software or robotic/hardware systems.
• Hands-On Hardware Testing: Strong hands-on experience testing physical systems—robots, devices, or other complex electromechanical hardware.
• Release Process Rigor: Track record of owning or driving release qualification and shipping software to production or to real devices with confidence.
• Automation & Scripting: Solid programming/scripting skills (Python and/or C++) for building test automation, tooling, and analysis.
• Systematic Debugging: Strong ability to reproduce, isolate, and clearly characterize failures across software and hardware boundaries.
• Quality Judgment: Sound judgment about risk and readiness—knowing what must be tested, what can wait, and when a release is good to go.
• Ownership: Ability to own the release process end-to-end and be a dependable quality gate for the team.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience testing robots, autonomous systems, or safety-relevant hardware.
• Familiarity with hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and simulation-based testing.
• Experience with CI/CD and delivery tooling from a test/release perspective.
• Exposure to fleet deployment, OTA updates, or staged/canary rollouts.
• Background in defining test strategy and quality metrics for a growing engineering organization.

Pay and benefits

Walden Robotics offers a competitive total compensation program, including salary, annual cash bonus, company equity, company-subsidized insurance programs, 401(k) with company match, flexible PTO, daily lunch, and other benefits. The pay ranges noted on our posts are for salary only.

• About Company ---

At Walden Robotics, we envision a world where general-purpose robots dramatically improve the quality of life for all people—supporting us at home, at work, in factories, on farms, and beyond. To accomplish this, we are building a team of exceptional professionals who combine world-class technical skills with creative vision, grounded in humility and collaboration.