Support Engineer (Weekend Shift)

Covariant in United States

THE COMPANY
Our mission is to build the Covariant Brain, a universal AI to give robots the ability to see, reason and act on the world around them. Bringing AI from research in the lab to the infinite variability and constant change of our customer’s real-world operations requires new ideas, approaches and techniques.

Success in the real world requires a team that represents that world: diversity of backgrounds, points of view, and experiences. Our common denominator: ambitious expectations, love of learning, empathy for those around us, and a team-first mindset.

THE ROLE
The Covariant support team is responsible for the health and support of robotic systems powered by the Covariant Brain. As a key member of that team, you will help remotely support robots in North America and Europe when customers contact us with issues. With full remote access, you will help debug software issues that arise. You will help the customers’ maintenance teams to debug hardware problems, potentially talking them through hardware replacements. You will escalate issues to the appropriate engineering teams when needed. You will improve our system robustness by filing good tickets for engineering to solve so that the number of support calls we get decreases over time.

This is a startup bringing cutting-edge technology to market. As an early member of the team, you will be crucial in helping us to build the company itself and bring AI-powered robots from the lab to the real world!

Our largest customers start at 6 am Eastern, so US East hours are preferable, but this is negotiable, as we have support engineers in Europe and China who are also working shifts.  The team is small enough that we can work with you to define hours that work for you. We also have enough redundancy to be able to cover occasional interruptions for a doctor’s visit, etc.
COMPANY CORE VALUES
LEARNING CONSTANTLY
STRIVING FOR EMPATHY
TAKING ON THE IMPOSSIBLE, TOGETHER

BENEFITS
Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family
Unlimited PTO
Flexible work hours
401(k) plan and match (applies only to United States employees)
Lunch and dinner each day (for on-site employees)
Monthly Health & Wellness budget
Quarterly Learning budget

At covariant.ai we don’t just accept difference—we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products, and our community. Covariant.ai is proud to be an equal-opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status.
    • Technical problem solving - support issues are complicated. Our systems vary from site to site, and the underlying machines are complex.  The breadth of things you’ll need to know is large.  You should enjoy hard puzzles.
    • Uptime - we have uptime guarantees with our customers, as they do with their customers.  Meeting our SLAs means that you’ll need to be tenacious about solving problems when they come in.
    • 2+ years of experience doing support, deployment, solutions, or engineering for a technology company
    • Comfort with the Linux command line and a familiarity with how code works
    • Deep knowledge of debugging software systems and some basic knowledge of fixing mechanical systems OR Deep knowledge of debugging complex machines (conveyors, robots, electronics, etc.) and some basic knowledge of software
    • A sense of curiosity and humility - Covariant blends robotics, cutting-edge machine learning, and deep knowledge of the materials handling industry, and no one has all three of those things to start but if you know one topic and are ready to learn the others, that’s all we can ask!
    • Be a key contributor in a fast-growing startup with an opportunity for growth
    • Help us do things that have never been done before
    • Push the boundaries of possibility with cutting-edge machine learning technology out of Silicon Valley
    • Friday - You’ve got your coffee and you're ready for the phone lines to open!  And . . . things are quiet.  You work on some documentation around an issue that came up last week.  As the afternoon continues, you deal with a couple of minor questions from junior bot tenders who are not very familiar with our robots.  Even minor issues are confusing at first, as the bot tenders are not always the best at describing what they’re seeing.  But you are patient, and eventually you realize that the issues they’re describing are minor and easily resolved.
    • Saturday - The calls start coming early, and the first one is a doozy.  One of the “put walls” that our robots use for sorting orders is not working.  The electronics are not turning on at all.  You pull up the electrical diagram and get the customer’s maintenance team on the line.  You start narrowing down the problem until you’re pretty sure that we have a faulty controller for the putwall electronics.  You’re not very familiar with these electrical systems, so you’re writing about what’s happening on our internal chat as you work. Even though it’s Saturday, engineers are chiming in with suggestions.  You’re about to guide the onsite maintenance team through the replacement, but then on the second time you restart the PLC, the controller unexpectedly comes back to life.  Weird.  You update the ticket with exactly what happened so that you can talk with the product team about it.
    • Sunday - A site lost power overnight, and during the restart the customer’s warehouse management software lost some state.  Now our software is out of sync with the customer’s software, and there are 8 orders that can’t be processed.  You pull up the messaging spec to understand how the two systems are supposed to interact.  Then, you start searching the logs to understand what went wrong.  Once you figure out what message was dropped, you resend that message manually, and voila, the orders can be processed!  8 customers are going to get the product they ordered, and everyone’s SLAs are safe.
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