Senior Electrical Engineer
Bay Area, CA | $180,000–$240,000 + equity | 5 days on-site
Some electrical engineering roles give you ownership of a board or subsystem.
This one puts you across the whole robot.
We’re working with a rapidly growing robotics company looking for a Senior Electrical Engineer to take ownership of the electrical integration problems that emerge when power, motors, sensors, firmware and mechanical systems all have to work together.
This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys solving problems at system level, not just optimising individual components.
What will you actually be solving?
Robots are electrically noisy systems.
Motors create interference. Sensors need clean signals. High-current power systems sit alongside sensitive electronics. Grounding, shielding, filtering, cabling and PCB layout decisions can quickly become problems across the entire machine.
You’ll be one of the engineers responsible for making that whole system work.
That means working across:
- Motor driver circuits and power electronics
- High-current DC systems and switching converters
- PCB design and layout
- Grounding, shielding and filtering
- EMC/EMI design and debugging
- Power and signal integrity
- Sensor electronics and integration
- IMUs, encoders and Hall sensors
- CAN, Ethernet, SPI, I2C and RS-485
- Hardware bring-up, validation and production
This isn’t a role where you design a schematic and hand it over.
You’ll be involved through the hardware lifecycle, from architecture and schematic design through layout, bring-up, debugging, validation and ultimately production.
When something behaves unexpectedly on the robot, you’ll be expected to get into the lab, understand how the different systems are interacting and work out what is actually happening.
What are they looking for?
You’ll likely have around 5-12 years of electrical engineering experience and a background building complex electromechanical hardware.
More importantly, you should be able to talk confidently about things you have personally designed, built and debugged.
That could include:
- EMC problems you identified and resolved
- Grounding and shielding strategies you developed
- PCB layout decisions and their system-level consequences
- Motor drives or switching power electronics you designed
- High-current power systems
- Hardware bring-up when things didn't work first time
- Using scopes, spectrum analysers, LISNs and probes to diagnose real problems
- Engineering trade-offs involving performance, reliability, manufacturability, cost and schedule
A BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Robotics or Mechatronics is required.
Experience within robotics, drones, EVs, autonomous systems or other motor-driven hardware would be particularly relevant.
What makes the opportunity interesting?
You’ll be joining a well-funded robotics business tackling technically difficult problems at the intersection of advanced software and physical hardware.
The electrical engineering team isn't there simply to support an established product. You'll have meaningful influence over how robotic systems are architected, integrated and taken into the real world.
It’s a fast-moving engineering environment where requirements can change, information will sometimes be incomplete and you’ll work closely with mechanical, firmware and controls engineers to make decisions.
If you enjoy that ambiguity and want genuine technical ownership, there’s a lot to get your teeth into.
The practical bits
Salary: $180,000-$240,000 base
Equity: Competitive package
Location: Bay Area, California
Working pattern: 5 days per week on-site
Visa: Certain visa transfers can be considered
If you like being the engineer people turn to when power, EMC, sensors, firmware and physical hardware all collide, it’s worth a conversation.