Connectivity Engineer

Connectivity Engineer Location: Wallingford - Oxfordshire (Hybrid) - (1–3 days a week on site) Permanent We're recruiting for a connectivity engineer to help keep our global robot fleet online. Our robots connect back to us over cellular, Wi-Fi, and mesh VPN often as guests on customer networks we don’t control. This is not an enterprise networking role. The work is closer to software and customer support than to running switches or a campus network. You will work with every level of the business from customers to the people deploying robots on the ground. Offices are based in Wallingford near Oxford, and this role is hybrid (1–3 days a week on site), so we’re looking for candidates within commuting distance. We’re open to candidates from a range of backgrounds. You’ll likely have spent time supporting or operating networked systems, perhaps at a telco or mobile operator, an ISP or managed service provider, in IT support or IoT, or at another robotics company. What matters is solid fundamentals, a passion to solve problems and some coding ability. A home lab, self-hosted services, amateur radio, CTFs, or write-ups of problems you’ve solved all count in your favour. This role will require a high level of flexibility around needs of customers. Please apply for more information. Responsibilities / Skills • Own connectivity cases for customer sites from first report to fix, working directly with customer IT on firewall rules, port access, and Wi-Fi coverage. • Working with customers on solving connectivity issues, following up and maintaining active communications • Diagnose faults across cellular, Wi-Fi, VPN, and DNS, and determine whether the problem is the network or the application. • Commission and configure routers for new sites; validate site networks before robots arrive. • Build and maintain tooling, mostly in Go and shell, that replaces manual steps in router setup and fleet checks. • Add monitoring and alerts for the issues you find, so they’re caught before customers notice. • Write runbooks and help shape incident and escalation processes. • Visit warehouse sites to test coverage and bring robots online (UK, occasionally abroad) • Hands-on experience with networks, Linux systems, or deployed devices, whether in a job or on your own. • Comfortable on a Linux command line, with solid IP networking (subnets, routing, NAT, DNS, DHCP, firewalls); able to use tcpdump or Wireshark to see where traffic stops. • Has written scripts or tools that other people used, in any language; happy to work in Go. • Experience handling technical problems with customers or end users through support, field, or deployment work. • Methodical in fault-finding; you keep track of what you’ve tried. • Comfortable when things are unclear; you’d rather help shape a process than wait for one. • Flexible: robots run across several time zones, so the occasional incident lands in the evening. • Useful but not required: WireGuard/Tailscale/Nebula/NetBird, cellular modems and SIMs, Wi-Fi beyond the basics, Prometheus/Grafana. • You will work alongside the engineer who designed and runs the current stack. After onboarding, you’ll be the first point of contact on connectivity cases. Over time you will go deeper into: • Cellular in practice: LTE/5G modems, SIMs and eSIMs, signal metrics, and working with carriers in different countries. • Mesh VPN design with WireGuard and Tailscale, including access control as code. • Wi-Fi in hard RF environments, and newer options like Wi‑Fi HaLow and running our own site networks. • Writing Go tooling that runs against a live fleet, with code review and testing. As experience builds, you’ll take ownership of parts of the stack, such as router commissioning tooling or fleet monitoring. When ap