Senior Research Engineer, Infrastructure

Description

About Tutor

We believe robots are the biggest lever we have to making the physical world a better, more affordable place. But robots are a rounding error in our society: nearly nine out of ten American factories and warehouses don’t even have a single robot, and robots have yet to make their way into our homes or places of business.

Tutor Intelligence is changing that.

Tutor is a robotics research and deployment company, building generally capable robot hardware and artificial intelligence to enable robots to go where no robots have gone before. Sonny is a semi-humanoid robot with frontier dexterity approaching the human form. Cassie does back-breaking work, moving boxes, pallets, and bulk goods for businesses from family-owned manufacturers to some of the largest brands in the world. Tutor robots are manufactured at scale and operate as a network, combining the whole fleet’s learned experience to train ever more capable robot artificial intelligence.

Founded at MIT and headquartered in Watertown, MA, our team is full stack: we design and manufacture robot hardware, train our own models, work directly with the smallest and largest end-customers, and maintain our fleet across the United States. We’re a team of researchers, engineers, technicians, operators, and sellers who love building things and solving hard problems.

Our mission is grand: robots everywhere, for the common good, raising the standard of living across North America, and then the world.

Responsibilities

• Tutor's research team pushes the frontier of robot capability across the full stack. Researchers have access to 100+ robots for data collection and evaluation, a massive network of teleoperators, scaled hardware and manufacturing infrastructure, and the ability to collect real world data at enormous scale. Our work covers the complete lifecycle of real-world data generation and model training from initial behavior cloning to post-training with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. And researchers and research engineers work closely with applied engineers to develop novel techniques into robot products that can be deployed at scale.
• You'll own the software that makes robot data collection and experimentation dependable, starting with the DF1 data-collection operation: connecting robots, operators, data storage, and research workflows so the team can run experiments repeatedly and trust the resulting data.
• What you'll work on
• Own a major system supporting robot data collection and experimentation, and keep it reliable.
• Build robot-side and backend services, data pipelines, and tools that reduce operator effort and raise experiment throughput.
• Make system health, data completeness, sensor timing, and experiment progress observable, and turn failures into actionable diagnostics.
• Make deployment, configuration, testing, recovery, and rollback repeatable.
• Diagnose incidents across device interfaces, Linux, networking, concurrency, and storage.

Requirements

• You have owned a substantial software system through design, deployment, operation, and difficult debugging.
• Strong Python, including tests, concurrency, and service interfaces.
• Practical Linux and networking, and experience running services in production.
• An understanding of distributed-system failure modes, data integrity, and recovery from partial failures.
• Experience building observability and using it to improve reliability.
• Nice to haves
• Robotics, device fleets, teleoperation, edge computing, or synchronized sensor pipelines.
• C++ or Rust, containers, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, or ML deployment.
• Operator tools and experiment platforms.
• Why Tutor?
• Whether you’re designing robots, closing deals, running deployments, or creating the processes that help us scale, your work doesn’t sit on a shelf. It shows up on real production floors, making physical work safer and more affordable.
• Our team of 160+ is driven by curiosity and a genuine love of building. Everyone here takes real ownership, learns fast, and holds a high bar while having each other’s backs. If you love hard problems and creating things that didn’t exist before, you’ll fit right in.

Benefits

• We take care of our team so they can do their best work. At Tutor, you’ll get:
• Fully employer-covered health insurance, so you’re protected without the premium.
• A managed 401(k) to help you plan for the future.
• Generous time off: unlimited PTO and all federal holidays off for full-time salaried employees, and 16+ days of accrued paid time off plus 1.5x pay on federal holidays for hourly employees.
• Regular in-office meals and team social events throughout the year.
• As Tutor grows, so will our benefits. We’re continuing to invest in ways to support our team at work and beyond.
• Tutor Intelligence is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds.