Nimble robotics

Robotics Diagnostics Engineer

San Francisco, CA Full Time
About Nimble

Nimble is a robotics and AI company inventing and scaling autonomous logistics with intelligent robots to enable fast, efficient, and sustainable commerce. We’re developing generalized robot intelligence and building general-purpose mobile manipulator robots, the first in the world capable of performing all core warehouse functions. We've recently closed a $106M Series C funding round at a $1 billion valuation and we're continuing to grow our all-star team.

Our mission is to empower and inspire mankind to accomplish legendary feats by inventing robots that liberate us from the menial.

Our long-term vision is to invent the Autonomous Supply Chain – everything from the inside of factories and warehouses to your front door – using next-gen intelligent robotics to deliver faster, more efficient, and more sustainable commerce.

We were founded from the AI labs at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. We’re backed by the World’s most prestigious investors and Nimble’s Board of Directors includes AI and robotics legends like like Marc Raibert (Founder of Boston Dynamics), Fei-Fei Li (Chief Scientist of AI at Google, Director of Stanford’s AI lab), and Sebastian Thrun (Founder of Google X, Waymo, Kitty Hawk, and Udacity)! 

Join us to leave your mark on the future of robotics, AI, and logistics!


Why Join Nimble?
At Nimble, we are committed to building legendary products, a legendary team, and a legendary legacy. Join us and become part of an ambitious, humble, and resourceful culture where your work will leave a lasting impact on the future of robotics and commerce.

Nimble's Core Values:
Be relentlessly resourceful - Challenge the status quo. Make the impossible, possible. Do whatever it takes.
Be legendary - Be the best at whatever it is that you do. Leave your mark. Motivate and inspire others.
Be humble - Leave your ego behind. Have a growth mindset. Learn and improve yourself every day.
Be dependable - Take ownership and deliver. Be loyal to your team and Nimble's mission.

About the Role
You will own the development and architecture of our next-generation robotics diagnostic system, which is crucial for improving the reliability and maintainability of the robotic fleet. This system must proactively detect and surface anomalies across the entire robot stack—from low-level firmware glitches to complex hardware failures—either automatically during operation or upon manual trigger. You will be the architect of the diagnostic data structure, translating complex sensor readings and error logs into actionable, easy-to-read health reports that accelerate root cause analysis for engineering, manufacturing, and support teams. This role requires tight collaboration with our Embedded Software and Infrastructure teams, and the Operations team to build a robust, scalable data pipeline.

Key Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and maintain the on-robot diagnostic framework, enabling both autonomous background checks and on-demand manual diagnostic scans.
- Define the diagnostic data schema, ensuring efficient, standardized, and human-readable reporting of fault codes, event logs, and status checks. This data structure must be scalable and optimized for use by both on-robot systems and cloud-based analytics tools.
- Work closely with embedded software and hardware teams to develop sophisticated diagnostic routines that surface hardware issues, abnormal sensor behavior (e.g., drift, noise, and communication failures), motor anomalies, and transient firmware glitches.
- Collaborate with the Infrastructure team to architect and build the data pipeline responsible for reliably collecting, storing (e.g., S3 or data lake), and processing high volumes of diagnostic data from the robot fleet.
- Ensure diagnostics generate clear, prioritized, and contextualized reports that summarize the state of the robot, enabling engineers to quickly understand the root cause of an abnormality without extensive log diving.

Qualifications
- BS or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical discipline.
- 3+ years of professional experience in developing diagnostics, monitoring, or telemetry systems for complex electro-mechanical devices, robotics, or embedded systems.
- Proficiency in software development (e.g., C++, Python) with specific experience in writing testable, robust code for embedded environments or robotics middleware.
- Experience with data structuring, schema design, and working with data ingestion pipelines (e.g., utilizing message queues, time-series databases, or cloud data storage).
- Deep understanding of common robotics hardware and firmware failure modes, including motor control systems, sensor interfaces (e.g., CAN, I2C, Serial, USB), and power management systems.
- Technical triaging skills, familiarity with Ishikawa diagram are big plus.
- Familiarity with interpreting hardware schematics and leveraging low-level system logs to identify failure points.