Hardware Test Automation Engineer

About the role

Sesame is building Cypress, a wearable AI hardware device that brings our voice companion into the physical world. We're standing up our hardware quality function from the ground up, and we're looking for our first dedicated Hardware Test Automation Engineer to build the automation backbone for the program.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and own an automated hardware test rig integrated with CI/CD (build → flash → run → report) for the Cypress device.
• Implement throughput/bandwidth, connectivity stress tests (e.g., iPerf, A2DP/AVRCP), including sustained-throughput, connection-stability/range testing, and simulated degraded-connectivity scenarios.
• Build API-level tests (easier to automate than full end-to-end iOS flows) covering throughput, sustained load, and crash detection.
• Run long-duration audio session testing (multi-hour, synthetic data) and battery/thermal performance characterization (including full discharge cycling).
• Build and maintain a live performance & stress dashboard with defined safety thresholds and target ("high-achieving") benchmarks; automatically flag regressions.
• Develop diagnostic tooling and support automated bug triage for hardware/firmware issues.
• Provide daily automation summaries and updates; support ad hoc/cherry-picked test runs when the team needs targeted coverage.
• Partner with firmware (and the QA coordinator) to define what is automated vs. manual, API vs. integrated, and which platform drives the rig.

Required Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building hardware/embedded test automation and integrating it into CI/CD (automated flashing, execution, and reporting).
• Solid wireless/networking fundamentals: Bluetooth audio (A2DP/AVRCP), BLE, and throughput testing (e.g., iPerf). You understand what to test, not just how to automate.
• Strong scripting/programming (e.g., Python) and the ability to build harnesses and dashboards from scratch.
• Experience defining test plans, metrics, and pass/fail thresholds from real data.
• Comfort operating in an early-stage, prototype hardware environment with limited units and evolving specs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience owning an automation testbed for a shipping consumer hardware product (wearables, audio devices, smart cameras, IoT).
• Performance instrumentation experience: latency, sustained-throughput, IPC/cycle-count, and thread/core-level tracing on embedded/multi-core platforms.
• Familiarity with Qualcomm chipsets and tooling (e.g., DSP framework, PyDebug) and the realities of vendor bug turnaround.
• Experience automating from a programmable Bluetooth central: Android, iOS, a Pi-based rig, or similar; bonus for breadth across more than one.
• Battery and thermal test methodology.
• Experience with sensor/IMU testing and creative physical test setups for connectivity/range.