# Field Engineer

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Other
**Salary:** $266k – $380k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Robotics, Linux, motion control, CAD, Python, robot middleware, electromechanical systems, Troubleshooting, fleet operations, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-08-04

> Maintains operational health of robotic workcells by diagnosing hardware/software failures, building diagnostic tools, and creating documentation for scalable support. Requires 5+ years in robotics/automation support and bachelor's in relevant engineering field.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Serve as an engineering owner for keeping a fleet of robotic workcells online in daily operation.
- Diagnose, fix, mitigate, or escalate issues spanning mechanics, electronics, controls, software interfaces, logs, and configuration.
- Partner closely with technicians, operators, and engineering teams to improve scalable fleet support processes.
- Build or spec lightweight hardware and software tools that improve monitoring, diagnostics, recovery, and handoffs.
- Create documentation, SOPs, and diagnostic playbooks that turn engineering insight into repeatable floor practice.
- Bring up and support prototype systems, then help transition them into scalable operations as they mature.
- Manage, triage, and respond to inbound tickets while maintaining clear issue history, ownership, and escalation paths.
- Write lightweight analysis scripts to identify fleet trends, recurring failures, and opportunities to improve reliability.
- Provide concise failure reports and operational feedback that help engineering teams improve system design.

## Requirements
- 5+ years of experience supporting electromechanical, robotic, automation, or human-in-the-loop systems in production, R&D, lab, field, or operational environments.
- Can independently troubleshoot messy real-world failures under time pressure, where symptoms and root causes are often different.
- Comfortable working across mechanical, electrical, controls, and software boundaries, including logs, configurations, and basic software debugging.
- Strong organizational habits around tickets, documentation, shift-to-shift communication, and follow-through.
- Communicate clearly with operators, technicians, shift managers, and engineers, especially when uptime and clarity matter.
- Love getting hands-on with physical systems and running complex issues to ground without adding unnecessary complexity.
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Robotics, Computer Engineering, or a related field.

## Preferred Qualifications
- Familiarity with robot middleware, motion-control stacks, Linux-based systems, service debugging, or real-time debugging tools.
- Experience with fleet operations, internal tools, observability, support platforms, workflow automation, or incident response.
- Experience troubleshooting complicated electrical assemblies, wire harnesses, instrumentation, or hardware-software integration issues.
- Ability to use CAD for small components, fixtures, brackets, or light modifications to existing assemblies.
- Experience improving operational throughput and maintainability, not just fixing isolated failures.

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