electrical Engineer Intern

Foundation • San Francisco, CA

31d

About The Position

Building dexterous hands and fingers for a humanoid requires custom electronics at every level — from miniaturized motor drivers to flexible sensor arrays wrapped around fingertips — and we need dedicated EE bandwidth to design, build, and iterate on that hardware
Off-the-shelf electronics are not designed for the spatial constraints, flex requirements, and channel density of a robotic hand with 20+ degrees of freedom — most of what we build is custom, and we need people who can design from a blank schematic
Our mechanical systems are advancing faster than our electronics stack — this intern will help close that gap by owning real PCB designs, bring-up procedures, and hardware validation work that ships to physical robots
The robotic hand is one of the densest and most demanding electronics integration challenges in all of robotics — small form factor, high channel count, mixed signal, high flex cycle life, and real-time performance all at once — and we need EE talent that is excited by that challenge, not intimidated by it
We are a small startup moving at speed — interns own subsystems, spin boards, and debug hardware on the bench alongside the core team
Every intern is a candidate for a full-time role; we are building the founding electrical engineering team for a product that will define what humanoid hands can do, and we want people who want to be part of that from the beginning

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field — with solid coursework in circuits, electronics, and systems
• Strong grasp of analog circuit fundamentals: Ohm's law, Kirchhoff's laws, op-amp configurations, voltage dividers, filter design, and signal conditioning — you can analyze a schematic and spot problems before powering anything up
• Understanding of power electronics basics: switching regulators (buck, boost), linear regulators, H-bridge motor drive topologies, and the difference between continuous and discontinuous conduction modes
• Foundational knowledge of digital systems: logic levels, pull-up/pull-down resistors, GPIO, SPI/I²C/UART protocols, and how a microcontroller talks to peripheral ICs at the register level
• Hands-on experience with schematic capture and PCB layout in KiCad, Altium Designer, or Eagle — you have designed at least one board that you ordered, assembled, and powered up yourself
• Understanding of PCB layout best practices for mixed-signal designs: ground plane management, power plane separation, decoupling capacitor placement, trace impedance, and keeping analog and digital domains from contaminating each other
• Ability to read component datasheets end to end — you can select an appropriate motor driver IC, understand its thermal limits, wire up its bootstrap circuitry, and configure it over SPI without being walked through it step by step

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with rigid-flex or flex PCB design concepts is a strong plus — robotic fingers have almost no room for rigid boards and connectors, so flex circuits are a primary design medium on this platform

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern