Lead Hardware Engineer – Production

About Tutor We believe robots will be the next chapter in making physical labor safer and more affordable. But, nearly nine out of ten American factories and warehouses don’t have a single robot. Tutor Intelligence is changing that. We build robots that go straight into real factories and warehouses, to do real work, with real impact. Our robot Cassie does back-breaking work, moving boxes, pallets, and bulk goods for family-owned manufacturers to some of the largest brands in the world. Our robot Sonny does handwork, using two arms to achieve human-like dexterity in picking and packing. Every robot learns on the job, and each one we deploy makes the next one more capable, more affordable, and faster to put to work. Founded at MIT and headquartered in Watertown, MA, we do it all in-house: the robotics hardware, the machine learning, and the field deployment and service. 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.

The Role You're the technical lead of our Production Engineering team. You're a senior hardware engineer the hardware team respects, the person who jumps in to root-cause a problem on a robot we need to ship, and the mentor who raises the bar for the engineers around you. You report to the Head of Manufacturing.

Your mission is to build the environment that lets our manufacturing team produce high-quality robots at a competitive cost: designs that are easy to build, test and service, manufacturing systems that catch problems early, and test coverage that keeps defects out of the field.

Your first priority is getting robots through bring-up and FAT clean: drive the top recurring build failures to permanent fixes and stand up the test systems our line needs.

This is not a traditional manufacturing engineering role. You've designed and owned hardware. You can open a schematic, put a scope on a board and find the problem, and you shape the product with design engineering instead of building whatever is handed over.

Example projects you might work on:

• Bench tests for drive and axis subassemblies so failures are caught before they're installed on a robot

• A functional test for the robot's main electrical bulkhead, the brains of the robot

• Inline testing so every robot is tested station to station and drives off the line

• A DFMEA on our current platform to rank failure risks and design out the top ones in upcoming builds

• Harness and access changes that make repairs faster on the line and in the field

Why This Role Matters Getting from dozens of robots to more than 1,000 is an engineering problem, not a headcount problem. Many of the designs, test systems and manufacturing processes that will get us there don't exist yet. This role is the technical leader who builds them.

What You'll Own

• Technical leadership: Lead Production Engineering technically. Set engineering standards, mentor and develop engineers, review their work and be the escalation point for the hardest problems on the floor.

• Robot debug and recurring failures: Jump in to debug electrical, mechanical and system-level issues on robots we're trying to ship, across PCBAs, power distribution, harnesses, sensors, actuators, motor controls and communication interfaces. Drive recurring build issues to root cause, permanent corrective action and validation.

• Test systems: Own the manufacturing test architecture and build the test systems, fixtures and diagnostics from component test through bring-up, end-of-line test and Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT). When our Quality & Reliability Engineer finds a test gap, you build what closes it.

• Design for X (DFX): Be manufacturing's voice in hardware design reviews. Drive design for manufacturing, test and service (DFM/DFT/DFS) early, and push back on decisions that add complexity, quality risk or cost.

• NPI and production readiness: Bring new robot platforms and engineering changes into production with validated processes, tooling, fixtures, work instructions and test coverage in place. Define test data and traceability requirements so build and test results flow into our MES.

• Yield and cost: Own first-pass yield, rework and cost-to-build. Drive down labor, scrap and BOM cost without giving up reliability, and qualify part changes and second sources for robots in production.

What Success Looks Like

• 90 days: You've debugged robots on the floor alongside the team and earned their trust. You're a regular voice in hardware design reviews, the top recurring build and FAT failures have clear root causes and fixes in motion, and Production Engineering has clear technical standards and a test strategy roadmap.

• 1 year: Robots pass bring-up and FAT with minimal rework, first-pass yield is climbing, cost-to-build is down, and fewer manufacturing-related failures reach the field. New platforms launch with DFX and test coverage built in, the hardware team brings you in early, and output scales faster than headcount.

Required

• Bachelor's in Electrical, Mechanical, Computer or Mechatronics Engineering. A Master's is a plus.

• Senior hardware engineering experience (typically 8+ years) designing, integrating and debugging complex electromechanical systems. You've owned hardware, not just the process that builds it.

• Strong electrical fundamentals. You read schematics, use scopes and meters, and personally isolate root cause across power, PCBAs, sensors, actuators and communication interfaces.

• A track record of driving recurring failures to permanent corrective action.

• Hands-on DFM/DFT experience working with design engineering to make products buildable, testable and cost-effective.

• Experience building test systems: fixtures, bring-up, end-of-line or automated test.

• Experience taking hardware from development through NPI into volume p