Staff Automation Engineer

About the role

The Role As a Staff Automation Engineer, you'll play a crucial role in ensuring the quality and reliability of our products through a combination of automated and manual testing methodologies. This is a high impact role that will work closely with SPAN’s internal Software, Device Software, Hardware Engineering, Systems, and QA teams.

Role & Responsibilities

• Co-design test automation infrastructure with Systems and Test Infrastructure.
• Automation provides the platform and drivers; partner teams write the tests.
• Diagnose automated test failures across firmware, hardware, and test infrastructure.
• Manage and grow a fleet of 50+ hardware test rigs across offices.
• Monitor hardware and software infrastructure health.
• Take architectural ownership of one or more of the team's critical systems.

About You

• Demonstrable proficiency building reliable tools and services in Python.
• Able to read and reason about C++, Rust, TypeScript, or similar.
• Experience with hardware-adjacent software: software that controls, monitors, or ingests data from physical devices or instruments.
• Experience owning internal platform infrastructure where your users are other engineers and your systems are in the critical path.
• Comfortable standing up new tooling from scratch and retiring it when needs change.
• Experience operating CI/CD infrastructure, particularly pipelines that run on physical hardware.

Required Qualifications

• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing, reliability testing, and certification testing methodologies.
• Experience managing fleets of physical test cells or lab infrastructure (Ansible, AWX, or similar).
• Experience with embedded systems or firmware testing (CAN bus, SWD debugging, firmware update flows).
• Experience with time-series data: ingestion, storage, and querying of telemetry.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, S3/AWS.
• Experience building reporting dashboards for engineering or leadership audiences.
• Experience with or preference for a rapid or continuous release cadence.

Focus Areas

• HITL-relevant: Understanding of hardware-in-the-loop testing, reliability testing, and certification testing methodologies.
• Data Pipeline-relevant: Experience with time-series data: ingestion, storage, and querying of telemetry.
• Framework-relevant: Experience with gRPC or similar RPC frameworks.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience working in a startup environment.
• Experience working in the renewable energy industry.
• Experience with Ansible or similar configuration management for physical infrastructure.
• Experience with or preference for a rapid or continuous release cadence.