Electrical Design Engineer, Tactile Sensing

Mind Robotics•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

Own the tactile sensor stack electrically — from transducer interface and analog front-end through signal conditioning, digitization, and delivery of clean, time-stamped data to downstream compute. Design low-noise analog front-ends for high-channel-count tactile arrays across one or more modalities (capacitive, resistive/piezoresistive, magnetic, optical, piezoelectric, MEMS/barometric), including amplification, filtering, ADC selection, and calibration strategy. Architect multiplexing and scanning schemes for dense taxel arrays, including crosstalk mitigation, drive/sense electrode design, and trade-offs between spatial resolution, sample rate, and power. Design high-density flex, rigid-flex, and ultra-compact PCBs for volume-constrained, cable-routed assemblies — fingertips, palms, gripper surfaces, and data collection gloves. Deliver deterministic, tightly synchronized sampling: design clocking, triggering, and timestamping architectures that meet sub-millisecond synchronization requirements with the robot's real-time actuator bus and ML data collection pipelines. Ensure EMI/ESD robustness — shielding, grounding, and filtering strategies for sensors operating millimeters from motors and power electronics in factory environments. Characterize sensor electrical performance — noise floor, SNR, bandwidth, drift, hysteresis, temperature sensitivity — and build the electrical side of characterization rigs alongside mechanical ground-truth fixtures. Bring up boards hands-on: schematic capture, layout review, first-article debug, firmware-adjacent driver and calibration work in collaboration with the firmware team. Contribute to DFM/DFA so sensor electronics scale from low-volume prototypes to high-volume production; work with PCB fabricators, assembly houses, and contract manufacturers to keep parts on spec and on time. Collaborate cross-functionally with mechanical, firmware, controls, and ML teams to translate raw transducer signals into calibrated, usable manipulation feedback.

Requirements

Exceptional analog and mixed-signal intuition. You understand noise sources, parasitics, and signal integrity instinctively.
5+ years of experience (or equivalent "hard tech" projects) designing sensor electronics, analog front-ends, or high-channel-count data acquisition systems.
Direct experience with the readout electronics of at least one tactile or contact sensing modality — capacitive, resistive, optical/vision-based, magnetic, piezoelectric, MEMS, or barometric.
Strong low-noise analog design skills: instrumentation amplifiers, precision references, filter design, ADC architectures, and calibration techniques.
High proficiency in schematic capture and PCB layout (Altium or similar), including high-density flex and rigid-flex design.
Solid embedded systems fluency: SPI/I2C/UART and high-speed serial interfaces, MCU selection and bring-up, and enough firmware capability to debug your own boards.
Strong bench skills — oscilloscopes, LCR meters, spectrum/network analyzers — and a hands-on debugging approach with the ability to iterate quickly.
Experience designing for volume manufacturing and working with PCB fabs, assembly houses, and contract manufacturers.
You are comfortable with ambiguity, move fast, and have an "engineering curiosity" that drives you to understand how the entire system works, not just your part.

Nice To Haves

PhD or research experience in tactile sensing, electronic skin, neuromorphic/event-based sensing, or contact-rich manipulation.
Experience with real-time industrial communication buses (EtherCAT, CAN-FD) and time synchronization protocols.
Prior work instrumenting wearables or data collection gloves, including tethered high-bandwidth acquisition systems.
DSP or ML-adjacent experience processing high-rate sensor streams into features or training data.
Prior work on humanoid hands, dexterous grippers, haptic devices, or prosthetics.

Responsibilities

Own the tactile sensor stack electrically — from transducer interface and analog front-end through signal conditioning, digitization, and delivery of clean, time-stamped data to downstream compute.
Design low-noise analog front-ends for high-channel-count tactile arrays across one or more modalities (capacitive, resistive/piezoresistive, magnetic, optical, piezoelectric, MEMS/barometric), including amplification, filtering, ADC selection, and calibration strategy.
Architect multiplexing and scanning schemes for dense taxel arrays, including crosstalk mitigation, drive/sense electrode design, and trade-offs between spatial resolution, sample rate, and power.
Design high-density flex, rigid-flex, and ultra-compact PCBs for volume-constrained, cable-routed assemblies — fingertips, palms, gripper surfaces, and data collection gloves.
Deliver deterministic, tightly synchronized sampling: design clocking, triggering, and timestamping architectures that meet sub-millisecond synchronization requirements with the robot's real-time actuator bus and ML data collection pipelines.
Ensure EMI/ESD robustness — shielding, grounding, and filtering strategies for sensors operating millimeters from motors and power electronics in factory environments.
Characterize sensor electrical performance — noise floor, SNR, bandwidth, drift, hysteresis, temperature sensitivity — and build the electrical side of characterization rigs alongside mechanical ground-truth fixtures.
Bring up boards hands-on: schematic capture, layout review, first-article debug, firmware-adjacent driver and calibration work in collaboration with the firmware team.
Contribute to DFM/DFA so sensor electronics scale from low-volume prototypes to high-volume production; work with PCB fabricators, assembly houses, and contract manufacturers to keep parts on spec and on time.
Collaborate cross-functionally with mechanical, firmware, controls, and ML teams to translate raw transducer signals into calibrated, usable manipulation feedback.