Mechatronics Engineer, Robotics

TAR•San Francisco, CA

7d•Onsite

About The Position

As the Mechatronics engineer you own the machine’s electrical integration and firmware: power, motor control, sensing, wiring, and the real-time control that makes a violent, vibrating piece of heavy equipment behave like a precision robot. The mechanical lead owns structure and mechanisms; the electrical engineer owns board design and fleet-wide architecture; you make it all work as one machine. This is a mid to senior level individual contributor role based at our San Francisco robotics facility, with regular field time at our GW-scale campus in West Texas.

Requirements

4+ years of electrical engineering experience, including meaningful time at a robotics company or on mobile or field robotic systems.
Deep fluency in the electrical side of robots: power electronics, motor control (BLDC, servo, or hydraulic proportional), sensor integration, and signal integrity in noisy environments.
Hands-on embedded skills: comfortable writing firmware in C or C++ for real-time control, working with CAN or EtherCAT, and debugging with a scope.
Track record of taking an electromechanical system from schematic to working hardware in the real world.
Pragmatic safety mindset: functional safety, e-stop design, and interlocks for a machine that exerts serious force.
Bias for speed and high ownership: you bring systems up from nothing and debug them in the field.

Nice To Haves

Experience with high-power battery systems.
Electrical control of hydraulics.
Off-highway, agricultural, or construction equipment experience.
Harsh-environment or outdoor robotics.

Responsibilities

Own the driver’s electrical integration, building on board designs and fleet architecture from the electrical engineering team: battery and power distribution, motor controllers, e-stop and safety circuits, and connectors and harnessing that survive dust, heat, and vibration.
Select and integrate motors, drives, and actuators with the mechanical team, and tune motor control for both locomotion and the pile-driving tool head.
Design and build the sensing stack: encoders, IMU, load and force sensing on the driving mechanism, RTK-GNSS integration, and limit and proximity sensing.
Develop embedded firmware and real-time control, including CAN bus architecture, control loops, interlocks, fault handling, and telemetry and logging.
Stand up the electrical test and bring-up process: bench testing, hardware-in-the-loop where it pays off, and field debugging with rigorous root-cause analysis.
Design for the environment: EMI on a machine full of motor drives, thermal management in West Texas summers, ingress protection, and serviceability by field techs.
Support the path from one prototype to a small fleet through wire harness DFM, documentation, and supplier management.