Robot Operations Engineer

Position Overview

Simbe is seeking a Robot Operations Engineer to own the reliability and performance of our deployed Tally robot fleet. This is a frontline technical role, responsible for remotely monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving issues across the fleet to maximize uptime, maintain service quality, and ensure Simbe consistently meets its commitments to retail partners.

This is not a passive monitoring role. The right candidate will close gaps between manual detection and automated alerting, build tooling to accelerate investigation and remediation, and use telemetry data to identify systemic issues before they surface as customer escalations. At Simbe, we expect team members to use scripting, automation, and AI tools to multiply their impact. This role is a direct opportunity to define how fleet reliability is maintained at scale.

Responsibilities

Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics Monitor Tally robot performance dashboards, telemetry data, and service health indicators across the fleet. Proactively identify anomalies, degraded performance, and failure patterns. Triage and diagnose issues using system logs, command-line diagnostic tools, and remote utilities.

Corrective and Preventative Maintenance Respond to reported issues and drive remote resolution across hardware, software, and network-related problems. Execute scheduled maintenance protocols, software updates, and health checks to sustain fleet uptime. Escalate unresolved issues to Engineering with thorough documentation of findings and steps taken.

Automated Detection and Remediation Tooling Build and maintain scripts, monitoring workflows, and lightweight internal tools to automate issue detection, fleet health checks, and recurring investigation tasks. Use AI-assisted development to accelerate tooling where applicable. The expectation is to continuously reduce reliance on manual monitoring through automation.

Telemetry Analysis and Systemic Issue Identification Analyze telemetry datasets, operational metrics, and error logs to identify root causes and recurring patterns across the fleet. Surface systemic issues to Engineering and Product with clear data and context. Contribute to automated detection workflows for known failure modes.

Service Quality Reporting Track and report on key service delivery metrics — scan completion rates, uptime, and SLA adherence. Identify trends that could impact the customer experience before they escalate.

Incident Documentation and Knowledge Development Log all incidents, resolutions, and recurring patterns in internal ticketing and tracking systems. Develop and refine operational playbooks, troubleshooting guides, and escalation procedures. Contribute to a knowledge base that supports continuous improvement across the operations team.

Customer and Site Coordination Partner with Client Success and on-site retail staff to communicate robot and service status, schedule maintenance windows, and ensure minimal disruption to store operations.

Cross-Functional Collaboration Work closely with Engineering, Product, and Deployment teams to relay field observations, surface systemic issues, and contribute to reliability roadmaps based on operational data.

Operational Coverage This role follows a Friday–Tuesday schedule to support consistent monitoring and operational coverage of the global fleet.

Qualifications

1–3 years in technical field operations, remote support, robotics, site reliability, or a related role

Working knowledge of Linux-based systems, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, Wi-Fi, VPN), and hardware troubleshooting — comfortable with command-line tools, system logs, and remote diagnostic utilities

Ability to analyze telemetry data, error logs, and operational metrics to identify root causes and systemic patterns under time pressure

Experience using AI tools and agents to accelerate troubleshooting, analysis, or workflow automation

Strong written and verbal communication for both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Comfort navigating a fast-paced startup environment with evolving tooling and responsibilities

Ability to manage some occasional travel

Preferred Qualifications

Ability to write scripts or build tooling to automate operational tasks (Python, bash, or similar)

Experience with robotics, autonomous systems, or IoT device fleet management

Familiarity with distributed systems — understanding how robotics hardware, networking, and cloud infrastructure interact

Experience building automated alerting or remediation workflows for operational systems

SQL or data analysis experience for querying operational datasets

Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, Opsgenie, or similar operational tools

Retail technology exposure (POS, inventory, WMS) is a plus

What We're Looking For

Someone who treats manual monitoring as a gap to close. When a failure mode recurs, the instinct should be to build the detection before the next incident — not wait for it. Candidates should be comfortable writing a Python script or workflow automation as a natural part of the job, and should use AI tools as a core part of how they investigate and work, not as an afterthought.