---
title: 'Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer at Medra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-robotics-engineer-medra-san-francisco-535bba2nsajh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-03'
---

# Forward Deployed Robotics Engineer at Medra

- **Company:** Medra
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-03
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai/bb4edbb0-f01a-4f58-be4e-f8749794a3d5

## Job description

What We’re Building: We have been quietly building the foundational layers of our Physical AI Scientist platform: 🤖 Physical AI that can operate scientific instruments with human-level dexterity. 🧪 Scientific AI that can analyze results, reason about next steps, and close the loop autonomously. This is an incredibly ambitious mission, but we believe that a team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things.

The Team:

- We’re a team of passionate, mission-driven engineers from companies like Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX, and Neuralink. We’re collaborative and love moving fast, both with our product and on team trips skiing or go-karting!
- As a team, we love nerding out about engineering and robotics — plus other topics like race cars or cooking. We like learning new things and then sharing our new knowledge with each other.
- Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don’t mind intense discussions about design tradeoffs. If we have arguments or miscommunication, we resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically.

In this role, you will:

- Operate like the technical co-founder of a small startup within Medra, owning end-to-end delivery of high-impact customer projects and defining the roadmap to meet customers’ most critical scientific challenges
- Translate scientific workflows into technical requirements, support system architecture from conception to delivery, and develop interfaces between robots, instruments, and software
- Design, build, and test scientific workflows on our Physical AI Scientist platform, combining existing capabilities with new production software and instrument integrations
- Make implementation tradeoffs with robotics and software engineers, deciding where to reuse existing capabilities and where a customer requirement needs new engineering
- Integrate, test, and debug software solutions in simulation and on physical robots
- Work with forward deployed scientists through integration testing, water runs, customer-site bring-up, and scientific validation, resolving engineering blockers along the way
- Diagnose failures across software, instrument behavior, robotics, and customer infrastructure, and work with specialist engineers to resolve them
- Extend deployed systems to support new instruments, consumables, and workflows, rolling out releases with appropriate verification and clear operating guidance
- Bring deployment learnings back into the platform by generalizing integrations and sharing reusable tests, diagnostics, and tooling with other deployment teams
- Clearly explain technical decisions, limitations, and risks to customers and teammates
- Travel to customer sites approximately 30% of the time for hands-on deployment and support
- This position is 100% in-person, you must be able to come on-site to our San Francisco office. We do not offer hybrid roles at Medra. We do offer relocation benefits for applicants that need to relocate.

Let’s talk if you have:

- Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production code
- Demonstrated systems thinking: designing, implementing, testing, or debugging interfaces in a production system
- Experience delivering technical solutions with customers or users, from an ambiguous problem to a working solution in use
- A penchant for customer-facing engineering: you enjoy working directly with users, making technical decisions, and being accountable for the result
- A track record of learning unfamiliar technologies quickly and making sound decisions with incomplete information
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and surface problems early
- Interest in developing depth in robotics, automation, and physical AI, with a willingness to work directly with physical systems

Bonus points if you have:

- Experience shipping a product that combines software and hardware
- Forward deployed engineering experience, or another engineering role with direct responsibility for customer implementations
- Production code in Python, C++, or Rust
- Experience designing APIs, distributed systems, or software that coordinates external services and equipment
- Experience designing integration tests, reliability tests, observability, or deployment tooling
- Experience with robotics, laboratory automation, or biology

What we offer:

- 401k
- Medical insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Relocation benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Weekday dinners

Medra is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies. We value diversity at Medra and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

## About Medra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Building autonomous Physical AI for the lab to accelerate scientific discovery by executing and optimizing experiments in a closed loop.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (340 Pine Street, Suite 100)
- **Founded**: 2021 (some sources cite 2022 – conflicting reports)
- **Founders**: Michelle Lee (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Life sciences automation, laboratory robotics, AI-driven experimental design
- **Target customers**: B2B – biopharma companies, academic research labs, government agencies (e.g., DARPA)
- **Mission / purpose**: Unlock breakthroughs at scale by tightly integrating AI scientific reasoning with physical experimentation.

## Products & Services
- **Physical AI Lab (Medra Lab 001 – ML001)**: A fully autonomous robotic workcell that executes wet-lab protocols (e.g., CRISPR, cell culture, NGS) using computer vision and robotic manipulation. Instrument-agnostic and modular.
- **AI Experimentalist**: The scientific reasoning layer that translates natural-language research goals into executable experiment plans, coordinates multi-step protocols, analyzes results, and refines methods in a closed loop.
- **Platform Type**: Physical AI + Scientific AI as a service (on-site deployment or remote operation via ML001).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $63M (Series A of $52M closed December 2025, preceded by $11M pre-seed in October 2025 and a non-equity assistance from PharmStars in 2023)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Human Capital (lead), Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Catalio Capital, Neo, 776 (Seven Seven Six), Fusion Fund, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 100% YoY (31 employees as of mid-2026)
  - Launched ML001 in San Francisco (April 2026) — largest autonomous lab in the U.S.
  - Announced DARPA collaboration (June 2026) to advance natural-language-to-executable-experiment capabilities
  - 8 open positions across biology, engineering, design, and operations

## Competitive Advantages
- **Closed-loop integration**: Combines physical execution with AI-driven experimental design and learning – not just robotic task automation.
- **Instrument-agnostic & modular**: Works with both manual and automated lab instruments, allowing easy swapping of modules and protocols.
- **Natural-language programming**: Scientists can edit protocols in plain English (written or voice).
- **Scalable data generation**: Logs every action, video, and metadata per sample for traceability and model training.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand partnerships with biopharma, academia, and government (DARPA is a key early customer).
- Advance the AI Experimentalist layer to enable full autonomous hypothesis generation and validation.
- Scale deployments of Physical AI Labs on-site and remotely through ML001.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as “intense curiosity and rigorous debate” with clear, direct communication and quick resolution of conflicts through mutual respect.
- **Team**: Community of diverse thinkers, “not just a company but a movement to transform biotechnology.”
- **Work policy**: Likely on-site at the San Francisco lab given the nature of physical robotics; no explicit remote/hybrid policy mentioned.
- **Perks & highlights**: Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI + robotics with a high-impact mission; funded by top-tier VCs; strong engineering culture (43% technical staff, many from Neuralink, Applied Intuition, Amazon, Carnegie Mellon).

## Sources
1. [medra.ai](https://www.medra.ai/)
2. [medra.ai/careers](https://www.medra.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/medra-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/medra-ai)
4. [cbinsights.com/company/medra](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/medra)
5. [medra.ai/darpa-collaboration](https://www.medra.ai/darpa-collaboration)
6. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai)

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