Member of Technical Staff: Hardware Reliability and Test

Location: Cambridge, MA

Department: Robot Hardware

Position Summary:

We’re seeking a Reliability & Test Engineer to define and drive the reliability strategy for our robots from early design through production and field deployment. This role is ideal for a senior hands-on roboticist who is passionate about making reliability a first-class design principle, not a reactive failure response. You will work across mechanical, electrical, firmware, controls, manufacturing, and operations teams to identify risks early, implement diagnostic and validation strategies, and drive design improvements through strong feedback loops.

Core Responsibilities:

• Own the reliability strategy, test roadmap, and reliability growth plan for robot hardware and integrated systems.
• Ensure reliability is built into subsystem and system-level designs from architecture and design review through production release.
• Define reliability requirements, metrics, test coverage, acceptance criteria, and release readiness standards.
• Design and implement diagnostic tests, stress tests, accelerated life tests, and validation procedures that expose real-world failure modes.
• Partner with firmware and controls teams to define telemetry, health signals, fault detection, and diagnostic infrastructure for monitoring degradation and failures.
• Lead failure analysis and build feedback loops from test results, field data, repairs, and failures into engineering and manufacturing design decisions.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in robotics, reliability engineering, test engineering, hardware validation, or complex electromechanical systems.
• Strong hands-on experience testing, debugging, and validating integrated mechanical, electrical, firmware, and controls-based systems.
• Demonstrated ability to define reliability strategy, metrics, validation plans, and design feedback loops for complex hardware products.
• Experience designing practical tests that uncover real-world failure modes and generate actionable engineering data.
• Experience working with sensors, actuators, power systems, embedded systems, logs, telemetry, diagnostics, or health monitoring tools.
• Strong systems thinking, failure analysis, technical leadership, communication, and cross-functional influence skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with robotic systems, ideally humanoid or custom manipulation robots.
• Experience with HALT/HASS, accelerated life testing, environmental testing, FMEA, or reliability growth programs.

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.

Walden Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to hello@waldenrobotics.com.

Walden Robotics participates in E-Verify. If you receive an offer of employment from Walden, you will need to go through the E-Verify process of digital verification of your employment authorization documents as provided on the Form I-9. Participation in E-Verify does not limit your right to work and verification will only be completed after you become

About the 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.