Robotics Engineer Position

Company: Whelix ()

Location: Boston, MA

Employment Type: Full-Time

At Whelix, we are building intelligent and accessible robots to accelerate life science research through wet lab automation. By uniting cell biology, robotics, and AI, we are transforming one of the most repetitive bottlenecks in the lab into a highly scalable process. We are looking for an experienced and versatile Robotics Engineer to join our core team in Boston to help develop and scale our automated cell culture robotic solutions.

In this role, you will bridge the gap between hardware and software, designing highly concurrent microservices, optimizing robot communication, and managing our cloud infrastructure and remote fleet connectivity.

As a Robotics Engineer at Whelix, you will play a critical role in both the maintenance of our current systems and the development of our next-generation automated cell culture platforms. You will take ownership of the robot’s software architecture, ensure seamless hardware-software integration, construct robust CI/CD pipelines, and manage backend cloud operations on GCP. Crucially, you will act as the last line of defense for operating system health, diagnosing and resolving complex system states on our edge devices.

• System Architecture: Design, implement, and scale a robust microservice-based software architecture for our robotics platforms, actively leveraging modern software architecture design patterns (e.g., Observer, Factory, Pub/Sub, State) to ensure strict modularity and maintainability.
• Network Communications: Architect and optimize robust data exchange pipelines utilizing modern network communication protocols, including TCP, UDP, Web Sockets (WS), and HTTP, to ensure reliable, low-latency communication between internal robot subsystems and our cloud backend.
• Concurrent Engineering: Develop high-performance robotics software, utilizing multi-threading and multi-processing architectures to maximize CPU efficiency and throughput.
• Low-Level OS Troubleshooting: Actively monitor, debug, and resolve operating system-level issues on the robots. You will be responsible for diagnosing file system anomalies, race conditions, deadlocks, and clearing zombie processes to ensure maximum system uptime.
• Product Development: Maintain and upgrade our existing Whelix Teknician software, and lead the ground-up development for our upcoming Whelix Associan system. Both products are state-of-the-art automated cell culture robotic solutions.
• ROS 2 Optimization: Utilize ROS 2 middleware to optimize system throughput, minimize latency, and ensure highly efficient data transfer across robot subsystems.

• Sensor Integration: Integrate and calibrate camera sensors (RGB, Depth) into the robot’s perception stack to provide real-time spatial awareness.
• Dynamic Motion Planning: Develop, implement, and tune advanced motion planning algorithms that utilize camera sensor data for vision-guided robotic manipulation, object detection, and dynamic obstacle avoidance.

• PC Hardware & USB Management: Manage and configure all peripheral hardware connected to the robot’s main PC (e.g., USB sensors, serial adapters, cameras). You will rely heavily on Linux kernel logs (dmesg, journalctl, syslog) and device management tools (udev) to troubleshoot connection drops, bandwidth limits, and device enumeration issues.
• Hardware-Software Integration: Develop and manage low-level robot control systems, heavily utilizing standard communication interfaces (CAN, UART, RS485, etc.).
• Debugging & Diagnostics: Perform hands-on troubleshooting. You will actively debug hardware-software integration issues, check physical wiring connections, and test electrical components to identify and resolve faults.

• CI/CD & Edge Deployment: Write and maintain robust scripts for CI/CD pipelines to automate testing, build artifacts, and securely deploy containerized software directly to our robot fleet (running exclusively on Ubuntu 22.04).
• Fleet Remote Access & Security: Manage secure, remote…