Technical Support Engineer (Robotics)

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.

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.

Responsibilities

• Do you like being the person who figures out why something broke, gets it running again, and then makes sure it never breaks that way again? Tutor robots work on real production lines in factories and warehouses across the country. When one stops, a customer's line stops, and someone needs to get it moving again, fast.
• As a Technical Support Engineer, you are the first engineer on the scene when a Tutor robot needs help. You'll work hand in hand with our customer-facing support teams, the tutors and customer success managers who talk to customers every day, to diagnose robot issues remotely, get robots back into production, and keep fleet uptime high. Between calls, you'll fix the things that cause them: improving customer-facing UI, fixing small robot-side bugs, and making hardware error messages clear enough that the next person can solve the problem without calling you. When an issue is bigger than a small fix, you'll track it with data and bring it to our core software team with the evidence they need to fix it at the root.
• We're looking for someone who stays calm when a robot is down and a customer is waiting, who is responsive by default, and who can't leave a recurring problem alone. You work independently with limited oversight and deliver consistently: a trusted, reliable member of the team. The initial focus will be on our Cassie platform.
• Own every robot escalation that comes in from our support teams during your shift, by phone and Slack: diagnose from logs, telemetry, and video, and get the robot back to work. When something urgent is beyond what you can fix, escalate to the software engineer on-call.
• Share the nights-and-weekends on-call rotation with our software engineering team.
• Scope and own fixes for recurring issues, such as small robot-side bug fixes, improvements to customer-facing UI, and hardware error messages that tell an operator or technician exactly what to do next.
• Make small feature tweaks based on requests from our customer support teams.
• Ship small, well-tested PRs into a large production codebase, following team conventions.
• Track larger software issues with data (how often, which robots, how much uptime they cost) and raise them to the core software team with a clear write-up.
• Improve the playbooks our support teams use, so fewer issues need an engineer at all.
• Use AI coding agents heavily, every day, both to investigate issues and to write code.
• Schedule and on-call
• This role works a fixed weekday shift, either early (7:00am–3:00pm ET) or late (11:00am–7:00pm ET). During shift hours, your team is the on-call: every robot escalation from our 24/7 support team comes to you first for engineering debugging, and an engineer from our software team is on-call behind you if you need more support. Expect frequent interruptions; when a robot needs help, it comes first.
• Outside shift hours, you'll share the nights-and-weekends on-call rotation with our engineering team. As the team grows, Technical Support Engineers will take on a larger share of after-hours coverage.

Requirements

• Experience debugging production software, especially software that relies on hardware (whether or not it was within robotics).
• Comfortable reading and writing Python and navigating a large codebase you didn't write.
• Writes reliable, maintainable code following team conventions; handles testing, debugging, and integration of your own work.
• Fluent with the Linux command line, SSH, and reading logs.
• Communicates progress, blockers, and tradeoffs clearly, including to non-engineers and under time pressure.
• Documents work clearly: ticket updates, commit messages, and issue write-ups someone else can act on.
• Able to work your assigned shift and take on-call shifts, including nights and weekends.
• A degree in computer science, mechanical engineering, robotics, or a related field.
• Nice to haves (zero or more)
• Experience with robots, industrial automation, PLCs, or other hardware in the field
• Experience on an on-call rotation, or on a support or operations team at a hardware or infrastructure company
• Comfort with SQL and pulling your own data from dashboards and log search
• Experience with systemd, Docker, networking, or VPNs
• Experience writing runbooks or troubleshooting guides

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.