Member of Technical Staff - Electronics Engineer, Actuators & Drives, Frontier AI & Robotics

Amazon•San Francisco, CA

17d•$150,000 - $300,000•Onsite

About The Position

Join Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team and take ownership of the electronics that make our robots move. As a Member of Technical Staff - Electronics Engineer, Actuators & Drives, you will conceptualize, design, and test the motor drive electronics that power our in-house robotic actuators—from the gate drivers and power stages that command motor current to the sensing circuits and communication interfaces that give our robots proprioceptive awareness. Your printed circuit board (PCB) designs will live inside each of our next-generation robotic systems, directly enabling the embodied intelligence that is central to FAR's mission.

Requirements

Experience in developing functional specifications, design verification plans and functional test procedures
Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Power Electronics, or a closely related technical field
5+ years of professional experience in power electronics design, with demonstrated ownership of motor drive or power converter hardware from concept through prototype and test
Expertise in inverter and motor drive circuit design, including MOSFET/IGBT selection, gate driver design, power stage layout, and thermal management for brushless DC or permanent magnet synchronous motor applications
Experience with current sensing circuit design and PCB-level integration of position/velocity sensing interfaces for motor control applications
Proficiency with electronics design tools including schematic capture and PCB layout (Altium, KiCad, Cadence, or similar) and SPICE-based circuit simulation
Hands-on experience with power electronics lab characterization, including use of oscilloscopes, power analyzers, thermal cameras, and network analyzers for drive circuit validation

Nice To Haves

Experience designing motor drive electronics for robotic actuators, collaborative robots, or other high-performance electromechanical systems where power density and dynamic performance are critical
Familiarity with wide-bandgap semiconductor devices (GaN, SiC) and their application in compact, high-efficiency motor drive designs
Experience with integrated gate driver ICs, isolated power supply design, and bootstrap circuitry for high-side switch control in half-bridge and full-bridge inverter topologies
Knowledge of EMC design practices for motor drive electronics and experience achieving CE/FCC compliance in power conversion hardware
Experience developing test automation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) validation setups for motor drive electronics qualification
Background working in fast-paced hardware development environments such as robotics companies, aerospace, or research institutions where rapid iteration and custom hardware are standard

Responsibilities

Conceptualize, design, and validate motor drive electronics for in-house robotic actuators, including inverter power stages, gate driver circuits, current and position sensing, and power management subsystems from concept through prototype and production
Lead PCB-level design of compact, high-power-density motor drive boards, including schematic capture, component selection, and collaboration with PCB layout engineers to achieve signal integrity, thermal, and EMC requirements in constrained actuator form factors
Characterize and optimize inverter switching performance, efficiency, and thermal behavior across the full operating envelope of FAR's actuator variants, using bench measurements and simulation to guide design decisions
Define and implement current sensing architectures (shunt-based, Hall-effect, or integrated IC-based) and position/velocity sensing interfaces (encoder, resolver, Hall sensor) to support high-bandwidth FOC firmware on microcontrollers and DSPs
Partner with firmware engineers to define hardware-software interfaces for motor drive control loops, fault detection logic, and communication protocols (CAN, EtherCAT, SPI), ensuring electronics designs support the real-time control requirements of robotic actuation
Collaborate with motor design and mechanical engineers to specify the electrical characteristics of custom BLDC and PMSM motors, align inverter design to motor parameters, and validate the integrated actuator electro-mechanical system
Lead hardware bring-up, functional testing, and failure analysis for new actuator electronics prototypes, developing test plans and characterization setups that systematically validate design performance and identify failure modes
Define electronics design standards, review processes, and design-for-manufacturability (DFM) guidelines for FAR's actuator drive portfolio, and mentor junior engineers in motor drive electronics design best practices