Autonomous Vehicle Test Specialist – San Francisco

About the role

Overview

Polymath builds autonomy software for industrial off-road vehicles, such as wheel loaders, haul trucks, cranes and excavators, deployed at steel mills, mines and farms. Each vehicle is retrofitted with drive-by-wire, sensors and compute, so a build validated on one haul truck carries no guarantee on the next. Every vehicle has to pass the same acceptance tests as the first before it goes into customer operation.

We’re looking for a test specialist who has validated physical robots and takes pride in rigorous, repeatable execution. Our Applications Engineers write the test plans; you execute them on autonomous vehicles in the field, capture clean data, and report defects with enough precision that engineering can act on. When you find a faster or more reliable way to run the tests you own, through better checklists, quicker setup or cleaner data capture, you build it and make it standard.

Responsibilities

1. Execute defined test plans on autonomous vehicles, covering navigation, obstacle detection, e-stop, geofencing and teleop, across bringup, stabilization and handover.
2. Run long-duration reliability and regression campaigns on each vehicle before customer release.
3. Collect and organize test data, including rosbags, logs, video and run records, for every test session.
4. File precise, reproducible defect reports with steps, conditions, frequency and supporting data.
5. Reproduce field issues by isolating variables such as lighting, terrain, dust, load and weather, and confirm fixes on subsequent builds.
6. Improve your own execution workflow, including setup, data capture and reporting. Feed gaps you find in a test plan back to the Applications Engineer who owns it.
7. Follow site safety procedures and work alongside customer safety drivers and operators.
8. Travel occasionally to customer sites for on-vehicle testing.

Qualifications

1. 3+ years of hands-on test execution on physical robots or autonomous systems, such as mobile robots, AVs, industrial robots or drones.
2. Experience with long-duration reliability testing (MTBF, soak tests) and KPI tracking across builds.
3. Disciplined documentation habits, with defect reports engineers can act on without follow-up.
4. Comfortable with Linux and basic command-line tooling. Familiarity with ROS or rosbags is a plus.
5. Willing to hold firm on a defect when engineering pushes back, and to bring the data that settles it.

Why Join Polymath Robotics?

• Mission: Remove people from some of the most dangerous jobs in heavy industry.
• Collaborative Environment: Work alongside fantastic team members on collaborative projects.
• Hybrid Workplace: Engineering is based in our SF Mission office three days a week when not on-site.
• Humor & Passion: We might occasionally be a bunch of rosbags, but our passion and humor drive us to accelerate autonomous vehicles in industry.

Application Process

Submit your resume and, optionally, a cover letter. As part of your application, answer this:

Describe a defect you found on a physical robot or hardware system during test execution. How did you reproduce it, what variables did you isolate, and how did you get engineering to act on it?

Polymath Robotics is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We don’t look for a “cultural fit”; we look for people who add to the culture.

About the interview

Ideally we want to get through this process in 1 week, 2 worst case:

1. Intro call - 30 mins on Zoom
2. Technical Interview - 1 hr on Zoom or in person
3. Team Meet & Great - 1 hr in person, usually around lunch
   • Can be combined with Technical Interview
4. Founders Call - 30 mins on Zoom or in person

About Polymath Robotics

Polymath Robotics is creating software that can safely control all of the world's industrial vehicles, and we’re looking for you to join our team. We’re a small, close-knit group of roughly 20 people, each of us experts in our fields, working to bring autonomous vehicles to various industries quickly. We believe this moment in robotics and autonomy is as groundbreaking as the PC industry of the 80s, and we need your help.