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Robotics Test Engineer

Pronto
Posted 3 months ago, valid for 19 days
Location

San Francisco, San Francisco 94102, CA

Salary

Competitive

Contract type

Full Time

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Sonic Summary

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  • The role involves designing and executing regression test suites, coordinating with Ops for field tests, and managing test requests from developers.
  • Candidates must have a minimum of 3 years of experience in software testing, QA, or test automation, along with strong Python programming skills.
  • The position requires building and maintaining automated testing frameworks and creating test cases that cover critical autonomous behaviors and edge cases.
  • The salary for this position is competitive and commensurate with experience, reflecting the importance of the role in ensuring software quality.
  • Periodic travel to customer sites (up to 10%) may be required, and some schedule flexibility may be necessary during deployments.

What You'll Own

  • Test Platform & Infrastructure — Design and build the core test infrastructure: harnesses, fixtures, runners, orchestration, and test artifact management for our ZMQ/Cap'n Proto middleware stack
  • Simulation-Based Testing — Build the simulation infrastructure that lets us run autonomy software against virtual scenarios, with deterministic playback and meaningful coverage of real-world conditions
  • CI/CD for Robotics — Build and maintain the testing pipeline that gates code changes — unit, integration, simulation, and replay-based regression — and integrate it cleanly into the developer workflow
  • Log Replay & Recorded Scenario Testing — Build infrastructure that converts production logs into reproducible test cases the QA Engineer can curate and the dev team can run

Responsibilities

Test Platform Engineering

  • Architect the test infrastructure that runs against our autonomy stack
  • Build test harnesses, mock services, and fixtures that let developers write meaningful tests against subsystem boundaries
  • Develop test runners and orchestration that scale from single-component unit tests to full-stack simulation runs

Test Automation & Simulation

  • Build simulation-based test infrastructure to validate autonomy software before field deployment
  • Develop automated test scripts that can run against simulation and log replay
  • Create tooling to compare expected vs. actual vehicle behavior from logged data
  • Establish metrics and dashboards for test coverage and pass rates

CI/CD & Developer Experience

  • Build and maintain the GitHub-integrated pipeline that runs tests against PRs, branches, and releases
  • Make the test platform fast and reliable enough that developers actually use it — flaky tests, slow runs, and unclear failures all count as bugs in your platform
  • Provide tooling that lets developers run targeted test subsets locally before pushing

Log Replay & Scenario Capture

  • Build infrastructure to ingest production logs and convert them into reproducible scenarios
  • Develop tooling that lets the QA Engineer turn an escaped bug into a regression test in minutes, not days
  • Maintain the scenario library infrastructure — storage, versioning, querying, lifecycle

Cross-Team Collaboration

  • Partner with the QA Engineer to understand testing needs and prioritize platform investment
  • Partner with developers on writing testable code and integrating tests into their workflow
  • Document the platform thoroughly — APIs, runner behavior, debugging tips


Travel note: Occasional travel to customer sites may be required (up to 5%) to understand field testing workflows and inform sim infrastructure design

Schedule note: Standard working hours, with light on-call expectations for CI/CD outages during release windows

Required Qualifications

  • 4+ years of software engineering experience, with significant work on testing infrastructure, developer tools, or distributed systems
  • Strong Python — you'll write substantial code, much of it touching production-adjacent infrastructure
  • Experience designing and building automation pipelines (CI/CD, test orchestration, build systems)
  • Deep familiarity with at least one large-scale software platform — comfortable thinking in terms of APIs, abstractions, and platform usability
  • Excellent debugging and systems thinking — you'll be reasoning about failures across simulation, networking, serialization, and CI infrastructure
  • Comfort building greenfield — much of what you'll work on does not exist today

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other safety-critical systems
  • Hands-on experience with simulation environments (Gazebo, CARLA, Isaac Sim, or proprietary)
  • Familiarity with pub/sub messaging systems (ZMQ, ROS, DDS) and binary serialization formats (Cap'n Proto, Protobuf)
  • C++ familiarity — enough to read and integrate against the autonomy stack
  • Cloud infrastructure experience for parallel test execution (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes)
  • Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing or real-time systems
  • Performance engineering background — you've debugged and optimized slow CI/test pipelines before

Technical Environment

  • Languages: Python
  • Test Frameworks: pytest, simulation-based
  • Infrastructure: Docker, GitHub Actions, cloud compute for simulation
  • Communication/Documentation: Slack, Notion

Example Projects

  • Build a simulation harness that runs the full autonomy stack against parameterized mining scenarios in cloud-based parallel execution
  • Design a log-to-test-case pipeline that ingests a production log fragment and produces a deterministic replay test the QA Engineer can add to a regression suite
  • Build a test platform dashboard that surfaces flaky tests, slow tests, and coverage gaps to the QA Engineer and developer lead


Pronto is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.




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