Whelix

Company: Whelix (http://whelix.co)

Location: Boston, MA

Employment Type: Full-Time

About Whelix

At Whelix, we are building intelligent and accessible robots to accelerate life science research through wet lab automation. By uniting cell biology, robotics, and AI, we are transforming one of the most repetitive bottlenecks in the lab into a highly scalable process. We are looking for an experienced and versatile Robotics Engineer to join our core team in Boston to help develop and scale our automated cell culture robotic solutions. In this role, you will bridge the gap between hardware and software, designing highly concurrent microservices, optimizing robot communication, and managing our cloud infrastructure and remote fleet connectivity.

Role Overview

As a Robotics Engineer at Whelix, you will play a critical role in both the maintenance of our current systems and the development of our next-generation automated cell culture platforms. You will take ownership of the robot's software architecture, ensure seamless hardware-software integration, construct robust CI/CD pipelines, and manage backend cloud operations on GCP. Crucially, you will act as the last line of defense for operating system health, diagnosing and resolving complex system states on our edge devices.

Key Responsibilities

Software Architecture & Core Systems

• System Architecture: Design, implement, and scale a robust microservice-based software architecture for our robotics platforms, actively leveraging modern software architecture design patterns (e.g., Observer, Factory, Pub/Sub, State) to ensure strict modularity and maintainability.
• Network Communications: Architect and optimize robust data exchange pipelines utilizing modern network communication protocols, including TCP, UDP, WebSockets (WS), and HTTP, to ensure reliable, low-latency communication between internal robot subsystems and our cloud backend.
• Concurrent Engineering: Develop high-performance robotics software, utilizing multi-threading and multi-processing architectures to maximize CPU efficiency and throughput.
• Low-Level OS Troubleshooting: Actively monitor, debug, and resolve operating system-level issues on the robots. You will be responsible for diagnosing filesystem anomalies, race conditions, deadlocks, and clearing zombie processes to ensure maximum system uptime.
• Product Development: Maintain and upgrade our existing Whelix Teknician software, and lead the ground-up development for our upcoming Whelix Associan system. Both products are state-of-the-art automated cell culture robotic solutions.
• ROS 2 Optimization: Utilize ROS 2 middleware to optimize system throughput, minimize latency, and ensure highly efficient data transfer across robot subsystems.

Motion Planning & Perception

• Sensor Integration: Integrate and calibrate camera sensors (RGB, Depth) into the robot's perception stack to provide real-time spatial awareness.
• Dynamic Motion Planning: Develop, implement, and tune advanced motion planning algorithms that utilize camera sensor data for vision-guided robotic manipulation, object detection, and dynamic obstacle avoidance.

Robot Control & Hardware Diagnostics

• PC Hardware & USB Management: Manage and configure all peripheral hardware connected to the robot's main PC (e.g., USB sensors, serial adapters, cameras). You will rely heavily on Linux kernel logs (dmesg, journalctl, syslog) and device management tools (udev) to troubleshoot connection drops, bandwidth limits, and device enumeration issues.
• Hardware-Software Integration: Develop and manage low-level robot control systems, heavily utilizing standard communication interfaces (CAN, UART, RS485, etc.).
• Debugging & Diagnostics: Perform hands-on troubleshooting. You will actively debug hardware-software integration issues, check physical wiring connections, and test electrical components to identify and resolve faults.

Cloud, DevOps & Fleet Security

• CI/CD & Edge Deployment: Write and maintain robust scripts for CI/CD pipelines to automate testing, build artifacts, and securely deploy containerized software directly to our robot fleet (running exclusively on Ubuntu 22.04).
• Fleet Remote Access & Security: Manage secure, remote SSH access for our entire distributed robot fleet across the internet. You will implement and maintain modern zero-trust networking solutions (e.g., Cloudflare Tunnels) to ensure safe, reliable connectivity to field devices.
• Cloud Infrastructure (GCP): Build, configure, and deploy Docker images. Run containerized services using Google Cloud Run, set up Compute Engine VM instances, and manage IAM network permissions for the broader engineering team.

Agile & Version Control Workflows

• Advanced Git Management: Establish and manage robust version control protocols. You will be responsible for defining our branching strategies (e.g., GitHub Flow, Trunk-based development), managing complex Git trees, and resolving deep merge conflicts.
• Technical Documentation: Create and maintain clear, comprehensive technical documentation for software architectures, APIs, and hardware integration processes using Confluence.
• Task Tracking & Git Integration: Manage development sprints, bug tracking, and issue resolution using Jira. Maintain and leverage Jira's integration with Git to ensure seamless tracking of commits, pull requests, branch management, and code deployments.

Qualifications & Requirements

• Experience: Proven experience in robotics software engineering, mechatronics, or a closely related field (experience in lab automation or biotech is a strong plus).
• Architecture & Networking: Deep understanding of modern software architecture design patterns and robust, hands-on experience with core network communication protocols (TCP, UDP, WS, HTTP).
• Operating Systems & Concurrency: Strict proficiency with Linux environments, specifically Ubuntu 22.04. Deep understanding of core OS concepts (multi-threading vs. multi-processing, memory management) and a proven ability to troubleshoot complex system states like filesystems, deadlocks, and zombie processes.
• Hardware Troubleshooting: Expert-level ability to parse kernel logs (dmesg, journalctl) and manage udev rules to debug USB peripherals and communication buses (CAN, UART, RS485).
• DevOps & CI/CD: Proven ability to write CI/CD pipeline scripts, build artifacts, and deploy containerized applications (Docker) to edge devices.
• ROS 2: Strong working knowledge of ROS 2 middleware, concepts, and performance tuning.
• Motion & Vision: Hands-on experience with motion planning frameworks and computer vision/sensor fusion techniques.
• Cloud & Security: Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, VMs, IAM) and configuring secure remote access (SSH) for distributed fleets using zero-trust tools like Cloudflare.
• Agile & Advanced Git: Proficiency with Jira, Confluence, and expert-level Git skills (interactive rebasing, squashing, managing diverse workflows, and branch lifecycles).
• Hands-on Skills: Willingness and ability to get hands-on with hardware, using multimeters/oscilloscopes to test electrical components and wiring.

Who We Are Looking For

We are looking for a hungry, high-trajectory engineer who wants to be a foundational builder of Whelix. You are early in your career but already punch above your weight class, and you are looking for the platform to prove it.

• Hands-On Experience: You have over two years of real-world experience building robotics or complex software systems. We don't care if those years were spent at a recognized company, an intense graduate research lab, or hacking together your own startup—we care that you have the experiences to prove you know how to build and ship.
• A True Self-Starter: You don’t wait for a manual, a Jira ticket, or a list of instructions. If you don't know a framework or a protocol, you sit down, read the documentation, and figure it out.
• Entrepreneurial Spirit: You are deeply curious about innovation, willing to dive into new topics, and always striving to stay on the cutting edge of technology.
• Decisive Ownership: You take full responsibility for your projects. You are comfortable making tough decisions and standing by them.
• Fast and Flexible: You adapt quickly to new changes and challenges. You thrive in a fast-moving environment where things evolve every single day and you have to wear multiple hats.
• Long-Term Vision: You are looking for a journey, not just a job. You understand that being part of a founding team means prioritizing a massive future upside and the chance to lead a major company over a standard corporate paycheck.

What We Offer

As an early core builder at Whelix, you will have a direct hand in every part of the company's success.

• Founding-Level Equity: We prioritize your long-term reward. You will receive a base salary plus a significant founding-member equity stake. This provides true ownership and substantial upside as the company scales.
• Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Work out of our Boston HQ at MassRobotics, giving you daily access to a vibrant community of elite engineers, entrepreneurs, and world-class mentors, as well as networking opportunities with industry leaders.
• A Masterclass in Startup Building: This is an unparalleled, cross-disciplinary learning experience. You will get firsthand exposure to every facet of a deep-tech startup, including fundraising, hardware design and engineering, customer support, manufacturing, logistics, sales, marketing, and more.
• Unmatched Autonomy: We operate with no corporate red tape. You will own the software architecture end-to-end and see your ideas move from the whiteboard to a functioning robot in the lab in a matter of days.
• Build on a Global Stage: Don’t just write code in the shadows—make a name for yourself. We actively champion our core team with named patents, co-authorship on high-impact publications, and speaking opportunities at world-class conferences. Your engineering will be front and center for top-tier scientists and industry leaders to see.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $90,000.00 - $110,000.00 per year

Work Location: In person