{"id":3938056,"url":"https://alion.io/job/oracle-principal-platform-software-engineer-robotics-and-lab-automation","title":"Principal Platform Software Engineer (Robotics and Lab Automation)","company":{"id":53,"name":"Oracle","domain":"oracle.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/oracle","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":90,"open_postings":341,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.598,"repost_share":0.021,"time_to_fill_p50_days":11,"computed_at":"2026-11-11T05:49:22Z"}},"role":"Robotics","role_family":"Robotics","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"State Management","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"Docker","optional":true},{"name":"EtherCAT","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"LIMS","optional":true},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":true},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"Motion Planning","optional":true},{"name":"OPC UA","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"ROS","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-06T08:26:53Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-11T11:14:31Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"We are developing reusable software to integrate and coordinate diverse robots, scientific instruments, and laboratory equipment. These capabilities will enable reliable execution of physical tasks and capture of experimental data, helping scientists develop and operate intelligent, automated laboratories.\nWe are seeking a Principal Platform Software Engineer with deep experience in robotics software, process automation, and physical system integration. Working with scientists, product teams, hardware engineers, and AI specialists, you will translate emerging requirements and prototypes into reliable platforms, owning capabilities from design and implementation through deployment and operation.\nThis is a hands-on individual contributor role requiring strong software engineering skills and practical knowledge of robotic systems, equipment controllers, sensors, actuators, and their software interfaces. You will solve complex hardware and software integration challenges, guide technical decisions, and build reusable automation capabilities that accelerate scientific discovery. Practical experience applying AI-including tool use, context management, orchestration, and evaluation-will help you connect intelligent decision-making with dependable physical execution.\nWe welcome experience across scientific software, industrial automation, robotics, AI platforms, and related fields. Previous laboratory automation experience is valuable but is not essential.\nThis role requires working from Oracle’s London or Reading offices four days per week, with frequent travel to Oxford.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDesign, develop, and integrate software for heterogeneous robotic systems, laboratory instruments, and automated equipment, including autonomous and non-autonomous devices.\n\nOwn major platform components from architecture and implementation through deployment and production operation.\n\nBuild backend services, APIs, SDKs, equipment adapters, data-ingestion components, workflow integrations, and developer tools.\n\nIntegrate robot controllers, device drivers, vendor SDKs, and equipment interfaces for reliable command execution, status monitoring, and fault reporting.\n\nWork directly with robotic arms, motion controllers, sensors, actuators, PLCs, and automated material-handling systems.\n\nDevelop reusable equipment abstractions that support multiple robot types, instrument vendors, laboratory configurations, and customers.\n\nImplement state machines, asynchronous execution, device coordination, persistence, and recovery from interrupted or partially completed operations.\n\nConnect equipment and local execution services with cloud orchestration and data platforms, addressing connectivity, latency, security, and operational constraints.\n\nIntegrate AI-assisted planning and agentic capabilities, including tool use, context management, orchestration, and evaluation, with clear boundaries between AI decisions, deterministic execution, human approval, and physical safety systems.\n\nWork with scientists, product managers, hardware engineers, and AI specialists to translate customer scenarios into well-defined software capabilities.\n\nGuide technical design, mentor engineers, and contribute to engineering planning while remaining actively involved in coding, testing, and troubleshooting.\n\nWhat You’ll Bring\n10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant hands-on development and integration of robotics, industrial automation, instrumentation, or other software-controlled physical systems.\n\nStrong programming skills in Python and one or more languages such as C++, Java, or Go, with experience delivering production software.\n\nDemonstrated experience integrating and commissioning robotic systems or automated equipment using controllers, sensors, actuators, vendor SDKs, and device communication interfaces.\n\nPractical understanding of robotics hardware, motion control, equipment operating states, timing constraints, and interactions between hardware and software.\n\nExperience designing reusable architectures, service APIs, typed interfaces, equipment adapters, and distributed-system components.\n\nStrong understanding of asynchronous execution, concurrency, message-based communication, persistence, retries, idempotency, and recovery from partial failures.\n\nPractical knowledge of agentic AI, including tool integration, context and state management, orchestration, evaluation, and controlled interaction with external systems.\n\nExperience troubleshooting complex problems across software, hardware, networking, and control systems.\n\nExperience with automated testing, simulation or hardware-in-the-loop testing, and system-level verification.\n\nAbility to independently lead substantial technical work, manage dependencies and technical risks, mentor engineers, and communicate across multidisciplinary teams.\n\nBachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Mechatronics, Electrical Engineering, Control Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.\n\nResponsibilities\nSoftware Development and Platform Integration\nPersonally design, implement, test, and deploy substantial platform capabilities, taking prototypes into supported production operation.\n\nWrite clean, maintainable, secure, and well-tested code using established OCI engineering practices.\n\nDefine modular service boundaries, shared interfaces, and reusable components across equipment integration, execution, orchestration, and data acquisition.\n\nDevelop communications middleware and event-driven integrations with equipment, cloud services, and external platforms.\n\nAcquire instrument measurements, equipment telemetry, and execution metadata while preserving scientific context, provenance, and traceability.\n\nAutomate equipment configuration, deployment, compatibility checks, diagnostics, testing, and routine operations.\n\nLead code reviews and design discussions, document technical decisions, and contribute to engineering plans.\n\nCustomer-Focused Delivery\nWork with engineers, product managers, scientists, and research users to understand customer workflows, technical requirements, and operational constraints.\n\nTranslate customer scenarios and feedback into actionable engineering tasks, acceptance criteria, and product improvements.\n\nInvestigate customer issues and support rapid, iterative delivery while maintaining engineering quality.\n\nDevelop an understanding of scientific workflows and identify opportunities to reuse capabilities across customers, instruments, and applications.\n\nCoordinate dependencies across software, hardware, infrastructure, data, and application teams.\n\nTesting, Verification, and Physical Integration\nBuild unit, integration, and functional tests; conduct performance, resilience, and system-level testing.\n\nDevelop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop tests to validate equipment behavior, timing, repeatability, and fault recovery.\n\nLead hands-on equipment integration, commissioning, calibration, and troubleshooting with hardware and controls specialists.\n\nEvaluate AI-assisted capabilities against defined acceptance criteria, including tool correctness, execution validation, and human oversight.\n\nCollaborate with safety and controls engineers to respect equipment interlocks, operating limits, fault containment, and safe failure behavior, preserving the independence of physical safety systems.\n\nReliability, Security, and Operations\nSupport production services through an on-call rotation that provides 24×7 response coverage for service incidents.\n\nAdd monitoring, logging, metrics, telemetry, health checks, and alerts to owned components.\n\nInvestigate and resolve issues in development and production environments, including incident response, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions.\n\nFollow secure-development practices and OCI standards for reliability, availability, privacy, and operational readiness.\n\nDevelop runbooks, support documentation, and automation for deployment, testing, recovery, and routine operations.\n\nAddress service performance, equipment connectivity, version compatibility, and recovery from network or device failures.\n\nPreferred Qualifications \nExperience with OCI, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or another cloud platform.\n\nExperience with Kubernetes, Docker, microservices, distributed data systems, event-driven architectures, or workflow orchestration.\n\nExperience designing cloud-to-edge systems, distributed equipment management, or remote orchestration of physical automation.\n\nExperience with industrial or collaborative robotic arms, PLCs, motion controllers, mobile robots, or automated material-handling systems.\n\nFamiliarity with robotics middleware and industrial communication technologies such as ROS 2, DDS, OPC UA, EtherCAT, Modbus, or vendor-specific robotics SDKs.\n\nExperience with robot calibration, kinematics, motion planning, machine vision, or coordinated multi-device operations.\n\nExperience integrating laboratory equipment such as liquid handlers, sample handlers, incubators, imaging systems, or analytical instruments.\n\nFamiliarity with SiLA 2, laboratory information management systems (LIMS), workflow engines, scheduling, or shared-resource coordination.\n\nExposure to data engineering, data platforms, scientific data pipelines, metadata management, data provenance, or data governance.\n\nExposure to AI/ML platforms, model training, model serving, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation harnesses, AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), or enterprise AI integrations.\n\nExperience supporting scientific, research, life-sciences, or enterprise platform workloads.\n\nExperience developing shared platforms used by multiple teams or customers.\n\nPrevious laboratory automation experience is valuable but is not essential.\nLocation\nOracle’s London or Reading offices four days per week, with frequent travel to Oxford.This is a fully on-site role requiring hands-on laboratory integration, testing, commissioning, troubleshooting, and operational 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