Operations Engineer, Nimble Brain
- San Francisco, United States
Posted 6 days ago
About the role
About Nimble
Nimble is an AI robotics company building the autonomous supply chain to power fast, efficient and economical commerce. We’re training robot AGI to power a proprietary generalist supply chain superhumanoid, the first robot in the world capable of performing thousands of tasks across the supply chain. We’ve raised over $220M at over $1B valuation and formed a strategic alliance with FedEx to build a national network of autonomous warehouses capable of generating many billions in annual revenue. We are a hardcore and obsessed team of the world’s best engineers and operators. If you are obsessed with your craft, enjoy a high-intensity and fast moving high impact environment, are super high agency in getting hard things done and want to be part of building the world’s most legendary robotics company at the most pivotal moment in history, we want to work with you.
We are on a mission to empower and inspire mankind to accomplish legendary feats by inventing robots that liberate us from the menial. We will accomplish this by training robot AGI to invent and build the Autonomous Supply Chain – everything from the inside of factories and warehouses to your front door – powered by generalist superhumanoids.
Our founding team comes from the AI labs at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and our board of directors include famed robotics and AI legends including Fei-Fei Li (Chief Scientist of AI at Google and Director of Stanford’s AI Lab), Marc Raibert (founder of Boston Dynamics), and Sebastian Thrun (founder of GoogleX, Waymo; Stanford Professor and considered the father of autonomous vehicles).
Let’s be legendary.
Why Join Nimble?
At Nimble, we are committed to building legendary products, a legendary team, and a legendary legacy. Join us and become part of an ambitious, humble, and resourceful culture where your work will leave a lasting impact on the future of robotics and commerce.
Nimble's Core Values:
Be relentlessly resourceful - Challenge conventions and overcome obstacles.
Be legendary - Be the very best and do work that inspires.
Be humble - Prioritize growth, learning, and doing whatever is needed to further the mission.
Be dependable - Take ownership and deliver with high agency.
The Role
Nimble Brain turns real-world operational data into the training sets, evaluations, and feedback loops that make our robots smarter every day. That data comes from our collection sites — operators, supervisors, rigs, and capture systems running shift after shift — and every hour a rig is down, a calibration drifts, or a workflow jams is an hour of robot learning lost.
As an Operations Engineer on Nimble Brain, you are the glue between operations and engineering. You'll be the technical backbone of our collection sites: diagnosing and resolving the issues that site technicians can't, translating floor pain into engineering priorities and engineering changes into floor-ready workflows, and constantly removing blockers before they cost a shift — then building the tools that prevent them from coming back.
This role is equal parts triage and engineering — and most importantly, knowing which one a given issue calls for. Sometimes the right answer is the workaround that keeps a shift collecting; sometimes it's pulling a recurring problem out of the rotation and killing it for good with a tool, an interface, or a procedure anyone on the floor can run. Most times, it's both. And every fix carries a second judgment: is this one you build and ship yourself, AI tools in hand — or a true dev-team fix, and if so, whose? Quick action in the moment, long-term consequences in mind: stabilize now, industrialize what earns it, route what's bigger, and build the observability that makes tomorrow's issues smaller than today's.
Responsibilities
- Act as first-line technical support beyond routine maintenance for our data collection sites: diagnose and resolve issues across rigs, teleoperation and capture systems, and the software that runs them.
- Industrialize engineering workflows into floor-ready tools: build the operator-facing interfaces, checklists, and automations that let work once requiring an engineer run reliably in production — setup, calibration, diagnostics, and everything like them.
- Build observability for the collection operation: rig health, calibration drift, capture pipeline status, and the alerts that surface problems before they cost accepted episodes.
- Be the bridge between ops and engineering: own the routing call on every issue — fix it yourself, or spec it as a prioritized, well-defined request to the right engineering team — and translate engineering changes back into documentation, SOPs, and training the sites can absorb without losing a shift.
- Partner with site technicians on the hardware line: they own routine maintenance and physical upkeep; you own systems-level diagnosis, tooling, and the escalation path into engineering.
- Use a data-driven approach to prioritize: quantify which failures and workflow frictions cost the most accepted episodes, fix in that order, and revisit the workarounds you've shipped to decide which have earned a permanent fix.
- Support site ramps and new-site bring-up: rig installation, station configuration, and getting new floors to steady state fast.
- Create and maintain documentation and runbooks in collaboration with technicians, supervisors, and engineering — so sites self-serve more every month and escalate less.
Qualifications
- 0–5 years of experience in a production environment supporting and improving complex robotics or hardware/software systems, or a minimum of 2 years of experience combined with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Robotics.
- Strong technical curiosity and debugging skills, including the ability to read technical logs and interpret data across the hardware/software boundary.
- Scripting and data fluency — comfortable with Python, SQL, or equivalent, with AI tools as force multipliers, to analyze production data and build and ship lightweight internal tools yourself.
- Demonstrated excellence in communication and documentation — this role's output is often a runbook, an interface, or a well-specified request, and all three have to be clear.
- Ability to work autonomously with minimal supervision, across multiple sites and stakeholder groups.
- Sound judgment under pressure: you can stabilize an issue in the moment without losing the long-term thread, and you know when a fix is yours to ship versus when it belongs to a dev team.
- Comfortable hands-on with hardware: rigs, sensors, cameras, cabling, and the physical realities of a production floor.
Additional Requirements
- In-person role at our data collection sites, with regular presence on the floor and travel between sites as needed.
- Flexibility to support evening shifts and occasional urgent coverage — collection runs on a shift schedule, and blockers don't wait for business hours.
- Work location includes production-floor environments with variable temperatures.
Compensation
The pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $115,000 and $150,000/year. Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this position will also receive generous equity for this position.
Culture:
We embrace challenges and strive to make the impossible possible each day. We’re not in this to do what’s easy or to be mediocre. We want to create something legendary and leave our mark on the world. We’re ambitious, we’re gritty, we’re humble and we’re relentlessly resourceful in pursuit of our goals. If this sounds like you then you might be a great fit!
Nimble Robotics, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We make all employment decisions based solely on merit. We provide equal employment opportunity to all applicants and employees without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable state, federal or local laws.
Nimble's Benefits
Unlimited Flexible Time Off
Enjoy the time you need to travel, rejuvenate, and connect with friends and family.
Health Insurance
Nimble provides medical, dental, and vision insurance through several premier plans and options to support you and your family.
Paid Parental Leave
Enjoy paid bonding time following a birth.
Commuter Benefits
Take the stress out of commuting with access to fully paid parking spots.
Referral Bonus
Get a cash bonus for any friend or colleagues that you refer to us that we end up hiring.
401k
Contribute towards a 401k for retirement planning.
Equity
Be an owner in Nimble through our equity program