Senior Electrical Engineer at Arn Autonomy

Location: South San Francisco

Department: Arn Autonomy

Location Type: IN_OFFICE

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

About the Company

About the Role

Responsibilities

• PCBA Design & Prototyping: Own the design and development of multi-layer PCBAs for GRID's subsystems - including motor interfaces, sensor electronics, power distribution, communication interfaces, and test fixtures - through conception, to development, bring up, debugging, and manufacturing. Perform schematic capture and layout incorporating high-speed digital, RF, mixed-signal, and power circuitry.
• Electrical Architecture: Develop and maintain electrical system architectures, including DC power distribution, circuit protection, grounding, communication interfaces, and subsystem interconnections.
• Noise Immunity & EMI/EMC Compliance: Design robust electronics for operation in electrically noisy environments, addressing grounding, shielding, filtering, signal and power integrity, and transient protection. Ensure designs meet applicable EMI/EMC regulatory requirements through pre-compliance testing, troubleshooting, and formal compliance testing.
• System Integration: Work with mechanical and software engineers to properly dimension power distribution and integrate electronics, wiring, and harnesses into field-ready assemblies that withstand outdoor dust, vibration, temperature swings, and weather
• Reliability & Validation: Identify potential failure modes, implement appropriate protection and fault-monitoring mechanisms, and develop test procedures to validate hardware performance, reliability, and environmental robustness. Participate in system-level and field testing.
• Documentation: Deliver schematics, layout reviews, engineering studies, test results, and architecture documents so designs are traceable and reproducible
• Design Reviews: Generate and present design concepts, and run design reviews with team members
• Manufacturing Support: Apply design-for-manufacturing and design-for-test principles. Collaborate with fabrication, assembly, and manufacturing partners to support prototype builds, production testing, and hardware revisions.
• Role Variability: This role covers design, assembly, manufacturing, and test. Your mix of responsibilities will depend on the project and team, giving you broad exposure to robotics hardware development

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional experience designing and developing electronic hardware.
• Strong understanding of analog and digital electronics, power systems, and core electrical engineering principles.
• Experience designing electrical wiring harnesses, including connector selection, wire sizing, shielding, routing, and manufacturing documentation.
• Experience designing for EMI/EMC regulatory compliance and electrical noise immunity, including shielding, filtering, ESD and transient protection, and pre-compliance testing.
• Experience with DC power distribution, voltage regulation, circuit protection, and system-level electrical integration in electromechanical systems.
• Experience developing embedded hardware incorporating microcontrollers, sensors, and digital communication interfaces.
• Proficiency with PCB design tools such as Altium Designer, KiCad, or equivalent.
• Strong hands-on experience with electronic test equipment, board bring-up, hardware debugging, and root-cause analysis.
• Familiarity with design-for-manufacturing and design-for-test principles.
• Ability to independently own hardware development from requirements through prototyping, validation, and integration, while collaborating effectively across engineering disciplines.
• Authorized to work in the United States.
• This is an in-person role, five days a week, in the San Francisco Bay Area. You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate.

Preferred

• Experience designing motor controllers, BLDC motor drives, or other power electronics.
• Experience with battery-powered systems, DC-DC converters, and high-current power distribution.
• Experience with communication interfaces such as CAN, Ethernet, SPI, I2C, UART, and USB.
• Embedded firmware development experience in C and Python scripting for test automation or hardware validation.
• Experience with mobile robotics, industrial automation, or other electromechanical systems.
• Experience with designing/preparing for UL/ANSI/FCC/CE certification of robotics platforms.
• Experience developing ruggedized electronics for outdoor environments, including environmental sealing, vibration resistance, and thermal management.
• Familiarity with functional safety concepts, emergency-stop circuits, interlocks, and fault monitoring.
• Experience transitioning hardware from prototypes to production, including working with PCB fabrication and assembly partners.
• Demonstrated experience with schematic capture and multi-layer PCB design, including high-speed digital and RF layout, signal integrity, impedance control, grounding, and stackup design.
• Ability to rapidly learn, evaluate, and adopt new AI tools and platforms as project needs evolve.

Benefits

• Opportunity to do foundational work on a real product: your designs ship on GRID, a robot deployed on live construction job sites
• Hands-on experience in electrical design, integration, testing, and debugging on real hardware
• Opportunity to impact a new era of purpose built robots that create real value
• Collaborate with mechanical, software, and manufacturing engineers in a small, fast-moving team

• Kaiser Gold HMO health plan
• Relocation support
• Daily lunches
• Flexible PTO
• Dog pets