Principal Software Engineer, Sustaining

About the position

At Berkshire Grey, our robots run 24/7 in e-commerce and logistics environments. As a Software Sustaining Engineer, you'll be a go-to expert for keeping our codebase performant in production environments - driving improvements in mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to recovery (MTTR), and Availability/Uptime. You'll partner with developers, QA, DevOps and field service to turn production data into actionable fixes, then develop and shepherd patches from code review into customer deployments. This role is ideal for someone who excels at root-cause analysis, works seamlessly across teams, and is driven to strengthen system reliability.

Responsibilities

• Lead investigation of field and lab failures; own root-cause analysis and drive fixes
• Instrument code with metrics/logs; develop health checks and self-healing routines
• Design, build, test, and deploy hotfixes and maintenance releases
• Identify recurring issues; propose and implement design or process changes to raise MTBF and lower MTTR
• Work with development teams to bake reliability into new features; train support teams on diagnostics
• Maintain clear runbooks; track and report on reliability KPIs
• Define and drive our sustaining engineering strategy and architecture
• Mentor and coach other sustaining engineers on best practices for reliability and incident response
• Collaborate with product leadership to integrate reliability objectives into the product roadmap
• Own the development and scaling of our platform-monitoring, tracing, and alerting

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, or related field
• 10+ years in software development or reliability engineering
• Strong coding skills in Python
• Experience in a fast-paced, agile environment
• Demonstrated ability to investigate and triage production issues end-to-end
• Analyze logs, metrics, and telemetry to pinpoint root causes
• Develop fixes or workarounds under tight SLAs
• Ship stable patches and rollouts with minimal disruption
• Drive post-mortems and follow-through on corrective action plans
• Communicate status and technical tradeoffs clearly to stakeholders
• Comfortable with Linux (Ubuntu), Version control (Git), Issue tracking (Jira)

Nice-to-haves

• Master's degree in CS, Robotics, or related field
• Familiarity with monitoring stacks (Elastic/Kibana, Prometheus/Grafana)
• Distributed in-code tracing frameworks (OpenTelemetry)
• Container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Automated test frameworks (pytest, unit/system tests)
• Chaos engineering and resilience testing methodologies
• Hands-on experience with robotic applications or other high-uptime systems
• Data-driven mindset: profiling, statistics, pandas