Sustaining Engineering Manager, Robotics

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.

Why Tutor?

Whether you’re designing robots, closing deals, running deployments, or creating the processes that help us scale, your work doesn’t sit on a shelf. It shows up on real production floors, making physical work safer and more affordable.

Our team of 160+ is driven by curiosity and a genuine love of building. Everyone here takes real ownership, learns fast, and holds a high bar while having each other’s backs. If you love hard problems and creating things that didn’t exist before, you’ll fit right in.

The Role

Tutor builds robots and runs them in customers' facilities across the country. Once a robot ships, it has to keep working for years, through packaging changes, worn parts, new sites, and software that keeps moving underneath it. We are hiring a Sustaining Engineering Manager to own that.

Your team owns the shipping robots as engineering products: the hardware and the software. When a failure shows up in the field, the team finds the root cause, designs the fix, proves it, and gets it onto every robot that needs it, whether that means a part change, a procedure, a firmware release, or a software change. The team also builds the instrumentation and tools that find problems before customers do, and works alongside the field support engineers who see the robots every day.

The team writes code, takes apart hardware, and talks to customers directly.

Problems on the list

• A robot fails at the same time every afternoon and the logs do not explain it. Someone has to decide what to measure, write the instrumentation, get it onto the robot, and read the result.
• A failure that turns out to be hardware, proved by a pressure trace and a worn part. The fix involves a supplier, a procedure, and every robot in the field.
• A customer changes their packaging and perception starts missing. The fleet data showed the change two days before they called, but nothing was watching for it.
• A fix that works on the bench and has to be rolled out to robots running production in three states without stopping any of them.

What You'll Do

• Own the shipping product: Hardware and software changes to robots in the field, from root cause through release
• Run root cause to closure: Decide what to measure, find the cause, prove the fix, and make sure the failure cannot come back
• Build the instrumentation: When the data to explain a failure does not exist, get it onto the robots
• Ship changes safely: Qualify fixes and roll them out to a fleet in production
• Run the team: Hire and manage engineers across hardware and software, and work closely with the field support engineers
• Face customers: Be the engineer a customer talks to when something is wrong, and the one who explains what changed

What We're Looking For

• You have sustained a shipping electromechanical product: owned changes to it after launch and lived with the consequences
• You understand the whole machine, mechanics, electronics, firmware, and software, well enough to find out which one failed
• You have managed engineers, and you have run a change process without letting it become paperwork
• You are comfortable talking to a customer whose equipment is down
• When something breaks twice, you change the thing that let it break

Nice to Have

• Robots or other hardware deployed in customers' facilities
• Root cause and corrective action, failure analysis, or reliability engineering
• Field service or support engineering teams
• Fleet software at a company running robots or vehicles in production

Benefits

• Fully employer-covered health insurance, so you’re protected without the premium.
• A managed 401(k) to help you plan for the future.
• Generous time off: unlimited PTO and all federal holidays off for full-time salaried employees, and 16+ days of accrued paid time off plus 1.5x pay on federal holidays for hourly employees.
• Regular in-office meals and team social events throughout the year.