Electrical Hardware Engineer, Robot Wiring and Integration

Roboligent is an Austin-based robotics company building Robin, a force-controlled bimanual mobile manipulator for warehouse and industrial work. Our patent-pending actuators give robots human-like sensitivity, so they work alongside people instead of behind cages. Robin is deployed with real customers today, and work ships to real robots within days, not quarters. Robin's power, motor phases, encoders, fieldbus, sensors and safety circuits run through a mobile base and two arms that move all day. Most field failures are not exotic: a ground loop, a shield terminated at the wrong end, a cable that rubs through at a joint, a connector never strain-relieved, a crimp done by feel. Our hardware team is strong on mechanical design. We need someone to own the electrical side with the same rigor: find what is fragile and fix it, through redesign or better build practice, whichever is the real cause. You will be our first engineer whose primary background is electrical, spending as much time at the bench with a scope and crimp tool as at a CAD station. Success means intermittent faults are fixed at the root, verified by measurement, and stay fixed across every unit. You will report directly to our CEO/CTO during our push to commercial deployment, working daily with the hardware team (three mechanical engineers), the software team and production technicians. Mechanical owns enclosures, mounting and physical routing paths; you decide what goes in the cables and how they are built and terminated. No direct reports today; you will guide contract assembly technicians during builds. As the team grows, this role grows with the electrical side of our hardware. Responsibilities Electrical reliability: audit power distribution, signal wiring, grounding and shielding; root-cause intermittent faults (communication dropouts, encoder errors, DC bus noise); fix, measure and keep them fixed across every unit Grounding, bonding and EMI/EMC: define the scheme for the whole robot, chassis to arms to base; set rules for shield termination, cable segregation and power-next-to-signal routing; design and verify filtering Cable and harness design: wire, cable and connector selection, strain relief, bend radius, routing through moving joints, labeling; produce drawings and wiring diagrams others can build from Prototyping and circuit work: build and modify prototype electronics; design small PCBs (breakout, interface, filter, power boards); basic circuit and filter design; through-hole soldering and SMD rework Build practice and workmanship: write electrical work instructions (crimping, soldering, termination, torque, inspection, continuity and insulation checks); train the team and assembly technicians; use fixtures, keyed connectors and test jigs to make the right way the easy way Installation and retrofit: install and retrofit electrical changes across the fleet, in our shop and at customer sites, and record what changed on which unit What this role is not Not the mechanical designer: enclosures, mounting and routing paths stay with mechanical engineers, working closely with you Not firmware or robot software: you should read logs and error codes to correlate faults with hardware, and work with software when a fault crosses the boundary Not the quality function: we plan to hire a quality engineer later; until then, workmanship standards and electrical inspection are yours Qualifications What we screen for, in rough priority order: You have chased an intermittent electrical fault on real hardware (noise, ground loops, dropouts, a failure that only appeared when the machine moved) and fixed it at the root. We will ask you to walk us through one. You know grounding and shielding as physics, not folklore: why a shield is terminated where it is, and what changes if it moves. You have designed harnesses or cables that went into a product and survived, ideally in something that moves or vibrates (robots, vehicles, aerospace, industrial machinery). Your hands are good: soldering, crimping, termination and rework to a standard you would defend. You write it down: wiring diagrams, harness drawings and work instructions someone else can build from without asking you. Nice to have: servo drives, motor wiring and encoders; EtherCAT, CAN; safety circuits (E-stop, STO, safety scanners); EMC pre-compliance testing; IPC/WHMA-A-620 or J-STD-001 certification; harness CAD (SolidWorks Electrical, E3, Capital or similar); battery-powered mobile systems. Engineer or technician: we hire at engineer or senior technician level depending on the person. An EE degree is useful signal, not a requirement. A technician who has owned electrical reliability on real machines and can explain the why is exactly who we want to talk to. Requirements 3+ years designing, building or troubleshooting electrical systems for electromechanical products (robots, industrial machinery, vehicles, aerospace, test equipment) Strong fundamentals in grounding, shielding, power distribution, and noise and EMI troubleshooting Hands-on harness and cable design: wire gauge, connectors, strain relief, routing, documentation Comfortable with an oscilloscope, multimeter and bench supply; reads schematics fluently; production-quality soldering and crimping Basic PCB design (KiCad, Altium or similar) and basic analog circuit and filter design Nice to have: servo drives, motor wiring and encoders; EtherCAT, CAN; safety circuits (E-stop, STO, safety scanners); EMC pre-compliance testing; IPC/WHMA-A-620 or J-STD-001 certification; harness CAD (SolidWorks Electrical, E3, Capital or similar); battery-powered mobile systems. Compensation Competitive base plus meaningful early-stage equity. We share the full picture on the first call. Interview process (2–3 weeks; we tell you where you stand after every stage) Intro call with our CEO (30 min): what you have built and fixed, what you would want to own, and full compensation One work sample by email: a wiring diagram, harness drawing, work instruction or failure write-up (redact freely) On-site bench session (half day, compensated): find the cause of a real electrical problem on a real Robin subsystem, repair it to your own standard, and tell us what you would change in the design and build process Final conversation with the founder and team References: two or three close colleagues; we will not contact your current employer without your sign-off Location On site in Austin, Texas; not remote-eligible. Occasional travel to customer sites for installation or retrofit. Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship, now or in the future. #J-18808-Ljbffr Roboligent