Electrical Engineer Intern

Foundation•San Francisco, CA

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.
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.
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.
Experience designing 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 and select appropriate components, understand thermal limits, wire bootstrap circuitry, and configure them over SPI.