Powertrain Reverse Engineer

ALTEN Technology USA•Foster City, CA

10h•$120,000 - $135,000•Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking a Powertrain Reverse Engineer to join our team. In this role, you will be responsible for reverse-engineering hybrid/powertrain signals from our autonomous-driving fleet built on the Toyota Highlander hybrid platform. The current system experiences issues with high-voltage battery depletion due to increased compute load. Your primary goal will be to decode the hybrid control system, including charging logic, battery state of charge, and thermal management, to resolve these issues. You will work with a team of engineers and technicians, utilizing provided tools and resources to achieve project success.

Requirements

Hands-on automotive CAN bus reverse engineering experience
DBC file authoring/editing
Proficiency with Vector CANalyzer/CANoe (or equivalent) for trace capture and analysis
Working knowledge of hybrid/EV powertrain and battery management systems (BMS)
Comfortable reading raw CAN traces and isolating/decoding unknown signals
Version control / Git pull-request workflow

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with Toyota hybrid systems (THS) and Toyota diagnostics (Techstream/TIS)
Python (or similar) for CAN data analysis
Familiarity with AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Cursor/Claude)
Prior work decoding OEM "black box" control modules

Responsibilities

Capture and analyze CAN traffic on-vehicle (with driver/technician support)
Reverse-engineer undecoded hybrid battery, charging, thermal, and powertrain diagnostic signals
Produce a validated, updated DBC file and submit it as a pull request to our repo
Re-run captured data against the new DBC to validate signal accuracy
Document decoded signals and methodology