Robotics Quality & Reliability Engineer

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.

The Role You're our first quality and reliability engineer: the hardware engineer dedicated to quality and reliability for production, building the function from the ground up. You report to the Head of Manufacturing and have the authority to hold any robot that doesn't meet the bar.

Your first priority is returned material: containment, MRB, failure analysis and supplier RMAs, tracked in tools you build with AI. Ship and incoming quality gates come next.

Up to 25% travel to customer sites and suppliers.

Example projects you might work on:

• A failure tracker that ties every returned robot arm joint to its serial number, build and supplier, and shows which joints fail and why

• Incoming inspection and test for refurbished robot arms before they reach the line

• A screening process for a batch of suspect control boxes, from quarantine through supplier return

• An automated ship gate that pulls test results from our MES and blocks a robot that's missing a check

• A weekly fleet quality report that Engineering, Deployment and Customer Success actually use

Why This Role Matters Every robot we ship goes to work at a customer's site. A failure there costs us far more than one caught on our floor. We need one engineer who owns two answers: are we shipping good robots, and what is failing and why.

What You'll Own

• Containment and MRB: When a failure is found, contain it. Quarantine suspect stock and identify every robot in the factory and field that could be affected. Run our weekly Material Review Board: disposition, RCA owners and corrective actions to closure.

• Failure analysis on returned material: Own FA on every returned part and field failure, including robot arms, control boxes, PCBAs, drives, power systems, sensors and harnesses. Direct technicians on teardowns and bench tests, make the root cause call and verify the fix works.

• FRACAS and reliability data: Build and run our FRACAS (failure reporting, analysis and corrective action system) using AI tools like Claude, on top of our MES, field tickets and robot telemetry. Track failures by component, supplier and serial number, plus repeat failures and escapes. Set reliability targets (MTBF, failure rate) for critical subsystems and track the factory and fleet against them. Give Engineering, Manufacturing, Deployment and Customer Success a regular, data-based view of where quality stands, and feed it into design reviews.

• Supplier RMAs: Be the technical point of contact with suppliers on parts we RMA. Send failure data and FA results, push for their root cause, issue SCARs and hold them to corrective actions, credits and replacements.

• Quality gates: Set the pass/fail criteria for incoming parts and finished robots, and make the ship/hold call. When a failure exposes a test gap, define what's needed, Production Engineering builds it, and you verify it catches the failure. Qualify new parts, refurbished parts and supplier changes before they reach the line.

What Success Looks Like

• 90 days: Every returned part has an owner, a status and a root cause path. MRB runs weekly on data. Every open supplier RMA has FA results and a supplier response. A live failure dashboard is in use across teams.

• 1 year: Field escapes are trending toward zero. Repeat failures on our top failure modes are down measurably. Incoming and ship gates are defined and largely automated. Leadership gets quality answers from your data, not from meetings.

Required

• You've personally driven production or field failures on electromechanical hardware (robots, automation, vehicles, industrial equipment or similar) to a verified root cause and corrective action.

• 4+ years in quality, reliability, test or hardware engineering.

• Bachelor's in Electrical, Mechanical, Computer Engineering or a related field.

• Experience working directly with suppliers on RMAs and corrective actions.

• You've built tools with AI (scripts, dashboards or automated checks) that other people used. Be ready to walk us through one.

• Python or SQL to analyze failure data and turn it into clear conclusions.

• Able to travel up to 25%.

Preferred

• Robotics, industrial automation or hardware startup experience.

• Hands-on electrical debug on motor drives, power and communication faults.

• Failure analysis on robot arms, servo motors or gearboxes.

• Reliability engineering: life testing, HALT/HASS, Weibull and MTBF analysis.

• MES and serial-number traceability systems.

• ASQ CQE or CRE certification.

Why Join

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