Lead Validation Engineer

Responsibilities

• Define and own the end-to-end verification and validation strategy for construction robots, from component inspection through production release and post-deployment feedback.
• Design and execute test protocols for electromechanical assemblies, embedded controllers, actuators, sensors, and full-system behavior, including endurance and stress testing.
• Design adversarial, edge-case, environmental, partial-failure, software-limitation, and long-duration stress tests.
• Measure and improve the ratio of QA-discovered defects to field-discovered defects.
• Act as the final quality gate before deployment; own release checklists, oversee acceptance tests, and make evidence-based go/no-go decisions.
• Collaborate with the V&V team to execute test plans, track bugs, and ensure product quality.
• Build and enforce regression processes, including regression coverage for every fixed bug.
• Monitor production quality metrics such as field failures, first-pass yield, and escape rates.
• Maintain quality documentation, test reports, production inspection records, reliability data, deployment checklists, and compliance artifacts.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or master's degree in mechanical, electrical, mechatronics, robotics engineering, or a related technical field.
• 6+ years of experience building hardware and firmware products, with 3+ years exclusively as a validation engineer.
• Experience taking a hardware product through the full validation cycle, including test planning, validation, production sign-off, and real-world deployment.
• Ability to write detailed test cases, design test setups, document results, collaborate on bug resolution, and maintain structured test logs and reports.
• Ability to write test automation using Python and Bash and work with robotics tooling to instrument, capture, and reproduce robot behavior in repeatable test sequences.
• Familiarity with ROS/ROS2, robot telemetry, embedded diagnostics, or real-time systems.
• Experience with sensor validation, calibration verification, or surface-quality metrology.
• Experience with HALT/HASS reliability testing, accelerated life testing, thermal cycling, vibration, and IP rating validation.
• Knowledge of ISO 9001, CE, UL, IPC, or industry-specific safety standards.
• Certification of at least one product against an international compliance standard.
• Expertise in SPC, MSA, FMEA, and statistical analysis, with an understanding of manufacturing and NDT processes.
• Strong leadership, influencing, written communication, verbal communication, ownership, accountability, and attention to detail.

Preferred Experience

• Experience working on physical AI systems where learned models, autonomy software, and hardware converge.
• Certified Quality Engineer (CQE), Six Sigma Green Belt or Black Belt, Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE), or IPC certification.

Compensation and Benefits

• No compensation information was provided.