Sr. Electronics Design and Characterization Engineer (InfoConn)

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

The Electronics Test and Validation team owns the module-level validation testing for all RV Tech electronic control units (ECUs). It is our responsibility to make sure RV Tech electronics are designed and manufactured correctly. With this goal in mind, we develop scalable tools, processes, hardware, and software solutions deployed for characterization, validation, and manufacturing. In this role, you will be a key individual contributor driving both design review and hardware characterization for vehicle electronics, with a particular focus on Infotainment & Connectivity (InfoConn) ECUs. You are not just assessing finished boards—you will actively review schematics alongside the EE design team early in the cycle, providing critical feedback to optimize the design and architect best-in-class verification methods. These ECUs are defined by SoC-class silicon, dense multi-rail power delivery, high-speed serial interfaces, and integrated wireless radios, so characterizing them means working across power integrity, signal integrity, RF performance, and thermal behavior on the same board. You'll work cross functionally to ensure that our electronics are designed to meet module-level requirements.

Requirements

BS/MS or equivalent work experience in Electrical Engineering or related field.
7+ years of experience in electronics design, characterization and validation testing.
Experience using lab instrumentation like high-bandwidth oscilloscopes and probes, VNA, BERT, power supplies, electronic loads, digital multimeters, DAQ, source measure units, current probes, and switch matrices.
Hands-on experience with at least one of: spectrum analyzers, vector signal analyzers/generators, or wireless connectivity testers (LitePoint, R&S CMW/CMX, Anritsu, or equivalent).
Strong understanding of Electrical Engineering fundamentals and circuit analysis
Practical understanding of power and signal integrity fundamentals for high-compute hardware: multi-rail sequencing, PDN impedance and decoupling, transient response, impedance- controlled routing, jitter and eye margin, thermal resistance and throttling, and measurement uncertainty.
Working understanding of RF fundamentals: path loss and cable/fixture calibration, VSWR and return loss, shielding and isolation, and conducted vs. OTA measurement tradeoffs.
Experience in scripting and data analysis using Python.
Demonstrated use of AI tools (Claude, Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) to write and refactor test code and to analyze characterization data, with sound judgment about where AI-generated work needs human verification.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on characterization experience with infotainment/head units, cockpit compute, telematics units, or connectivity gateways.
Experience with radio coexistence and desense debug, including noise source isolation, shielding and layout mitigations, and correlation to spectral measurements.
Familiar with low-level firmware and C programming, including chipset radio test modes and vendor toolchains (NVIDIA, Qualcomm, TI, NXP, Renesas).
Comfort working at the Linux/Android/QNX command line on the target — shell scripting, ADB, log capture, and interpreting kernel and boot logs.
Experience with Altium Designer.
Working knowledge of vehicle electrical systems and communication buses (Ethernet, SPI, CAN, LIN, etc.) and diagnostic protocols (UDS, XCP).
Experience in developing automated test setups.
Experience designing custom PCBAs, high-speed interposers, RF fixtures, or characterization breakout boards.
Experience with storage endurance and health characterization (eMMC/UFS/NVMe wear, error rates, retention).
Experience with thermal instrumentation — thermocouples, IR imaging, and thermal characterization of enclosed ECUs.
Experience in Databricks or similar environment.

Responsibilities

Develop detailed design verification and characterization test plans and test requirements for all phases of ECU programs, with input from reliability, design, RF, and firmware teams.
Execute characterization testing plans according to project milestones.
Own test coverage reports and analysis.
Perform bench-level characterization at IC and PCBA levels, including multi-rail power sequencing and PMIC behavior, rail transient response and ripple, load step response, inrush, power-state transitions (sleep/suspend/wake), quiescent and standby current, brownout and power-interrupt thresholds, and thermal throttling behavior.
Characterize high-speed interfaces at the ECU connector: camera and display serdes links (GMSL, FPD-Link), USB, PCIe, Automotive Ethernet (100BASE-T1/1000BASE-T1/multi-gig), and debug interfaces — including eye diagrams, jitter, BER, link margin, and link training behavior over voltage and temperature.
Characterize the conducted RF performance of integrated radios — Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/BLE, cellular (LTE/5G), UWB, NFC, and GNSS — covering TX power and spectral quality, RX sensitivity, spurious emissions, and desense/coexistence between radios and against on-board digital and switching noise sources.
Lead the power integrity and coexistence/desense characterization efforts for InfoConn ECUs, including correlation of measured behavior back to design intent and layout.
Characterize protection and fault behavior: over-voltage and under-voltage, reverse polarity, load dump, interface short and disconnect conditions, storage and memory stress, and verification that the ECU reports the correct diagnostics and recovers as designed.
Provide early feedback to design engineers regarding design decisions, testability, test point access, and instrumentation hooks needed for characterization.
Support creation and present Design for Testability (DFT) reports for ECU designs.
Follow characterization schedules and communicate status with upper management and cross-functional teams.
Write automation scripts and instrumentation drivers to speed up characterization testing using Python, using AI coding agents to accelerate development while owning code quality, review, and validation.
Leverage AI tooling to analyze characterization datasets at scale — surfacing parametric drift, part-to-part and temperature-dependent variation, outliers, and failure clustering across large sweep and log datasets — and turn those findings into concrete design or test recommendations, with sound judgment about verifying AI-generated conclusions before acting on them.
Work with software engineers to flash, test, and troubleshoot firmware, including bootloaders, multi-image software loads, production test modes, and radio test modes.
Participate in the cross-functional effort to root cause non-compliance test results during testing by leveraging data analysis, and drive design, RF, firmware, and test partners to closure on findings.