Software Engineer - HIL

Location: Austin, Texas, United States; South San Francisco, California, United States

Department: Software

The Role

Neuralink’s next generation surgical robot will perform brain surgery at scale, installing hundreds of tiny threads into the brain to enable brain computer communication.

You will own the robot’s Hardware In the Loop (HIL) test system. Exercise the production surgical robot, controllers and firmware against controlled inputs, reproduce faults, and automate verification. Your HIL will enable unattended test & verification to run day and night. Your work will help deliver reliable surgical robots at scale, bringing Neuralink to more people.

What you’ll do

• Build and maintain robot HIL — real hardware running production software and firmware.
• Write automated HIL tests for integration, timing, faults, and bring-up.
• Define pass/fail, coverage, and acceptance criteria.
• Wire software-in-the-loop tests, HIL tests, and hardware acceptance into one CI pipeline with logs, traces, and reproducible results.
• Own release-gating tests. When a failure escapes sim or HIL, you reproduce it and close the coverage gap.

Note: The team is hiring engineers at all levels, both junior and senior. What matters most is evidence of exceptional abilities and a drive to succeed.

What we’re looking for

• Strong Rust skills; Python for test tooling and analysis. Comfortable close to drivers, firmware, and buses.
• Experience with HIL, test rigs, or system-level verification on robots, vehicles, or similar hardware.
• Experience debugging async and concurrent systems, RPC, telemetry, and timing failures across software and firmware.
• Experience building automated test pipelines. Bazel experience is a plus.
• Effective at using AI agents to accelerate work while maintaining quality.
• Obsession with repeatability, edge cases, and traceability.
• Required: Bachelor's degree in a technical field (Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, etc.) or equivalent practical experience.