Principal Robotics Systems Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 29, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 20, 2026. Mayo Clinic scores A on the Alion truth index.
Enterprise robotics at Mayo Clinic spans clinical and surgical robotics and service and mobile robotics logistics, transport, environmental services, and patient-facing platforms delivered through multi-vendor fleets on a shared foundation of connectivity, data, security, and standards, and evolving from sensor-driven, deterministic robots toward AI-driven autonomous systems. The Principal Robotics Systems Engineer is the most senior integration-and-platform individual contributor, exercising broad technical authority across multiple enterprise-critical robotics initiatives. The incumbent sets the engineering direction for enterprise fleet observability, cross-vendor orchestration, and multi-vendor interoperability at enterprise scale, and serves as the definitive technical resource for the hardest systems problems. Working in close partnership with enterprise architects who own enterprise reference architecture and standards, the principal translates that architecture into concrete, scaled engineering reality across initiatives without owning the enterprise architecture itself. This is an individual-contributor role with no direct reports that provides broad functional and technical leadership while modeling stewardship, integrity, and a commitment to developing others in service of patients, staff, and the organization.
Bachelor's degree in robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, systems engineering, mechatronics, or a related field and ten (10) or more years of progressively responsible relevant experience required, including demonstrated technical leadership of complex implementations.
Master's or doctoral degree in a related field preferred.
Extensive, demonstrated authority in multi-vendor robotics integration, interoperability standards, and fleet or platform engineering at enterprise scale is expected.
Track record setting technical direction for interoperability, orchestration, and observability platforms; deep expertise in interoperability standards and frameworks such as VDA 5050, Open-RMF, and OPC UA and healthcare data standards such as HL7 (including FHIR); cybersecurity frameworks for connected medical and operational technology such as ISA/IEC 62443 and IEC 81001-5-1, with working knowledge of FDA premarket cybersecurity guidance and ANSI/AAMI SW96 for vendor evaluation; leadership of cross-functional technical initiatives in healthcare or comparable regulated settings.
Advanced vendor-platform, safety, security (such as ISA/IEC 62443), or architecture certification.
The preferred candidate will possess:
- Significant experience architecting, developing, and operating production robotics, autonomous systems, IoT, edge-computing, or other distributed cyber-physical systems.
- Experience with ROS/ROS 2 and integration of heterogeneous robotic platforms, fleet-management systems, and vendor APIs.
- Experience designing scalable distributed systems and integration architectures using technologies such as REST/gRPC APIs, event-driven architectures, message brokers, MQTT, Kafka, or related technologies.
- Experience with cloud-native and edge technologies, including containers, Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
- Experience designing fleet observability and operational telemetry solutions using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, ELK/OpenSearch, or similar platforms.
- Experience with deployment, configuration management, CI/CD, remote software updates, and lifecycle management of distributed physical devices or robotic fleets.
- Experience integrating multi-vendor robotic or autonomous systems and familiarity with robotics interoperability frameworks or standards such as Open-RMF, VDA 5050, MassRobotics AMR Interoperability, or related approaches.
- Experience designing resilient systems that account for intermittent connectivity, device failures, cybersecurity, identity, networking, and edge/cloud operation.
- Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead or senior individual contributor for complex, enterprise-scale platform or systems-integration initiatives, preferably involving robotics, autonomous systems, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, or other mission-critical environments.