About the job
Quartermaster AI develops AI and robotics systems focused on ocean safety and sustainable management. The team creates distributed open-ocean platforms that allow vessels to sense, compute, and communicate, supporting maritime domain awareness in critical situations.
Role overview
The Principal Platform Systems Engineer - Test Automation Lead sets the foundation for reliable development across cloud infrastructure, edge computing, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing. Reporting to the Head of Platform, this role supports the hardware, machine learning, and robotics teams as they deploy in demanding maritime environments. Success in this position requires a systems generalist who is comfortable with AWS pipelines, lab automation, and embedded edge devices.
What you will do
- Design and manage HIL and software-in-the-loop (SIL) test environments, automating lab workflows and hardware bring-up to ensure thorough regression testing.
- Develop and maintain deployment pipelines with custom release gating for embedded and edge platforms, including NVIDIA Jetson, to support reliable hardware-dependent software updates.
- Build internal tools and simulation or replay pipelines to accelerate and stabilize development cycles for robotics and ML teams.
- Implement observability across lab and edge deployments, and provide technical leadership on architecture, standards, and quality controls across teams.
Requirements
- Minimum 10 years in systems or platform engineering, developer experience (DevEx), or embedded infrastructure, with a record of results in startup-like settings.
- Strong background in Linux systems engineering, networking, and troubleshooting production environments for containerized and reproducible systems.
- Direct experience with hardware interfaces such as UART, SPI, I2C, CAN, low-level device communication, and integrating lab instrumentation into automated test frameworks.
- Familiarity with NVIDIA Jetson, software-defined radio (SDR) or RF validation, or deploying AI/ML workloads at the edge in maritime or similarly challenging environments.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses
- Health insurance and wellness programs
- 401k plan with company matching
- Generous paid time off and flexible hours
Location: Arlington, VA

