Electrical Engineer

Team: R&D - Research

Location: Watertown, MA

Commitment: Full-time

Workplace Type: onsite

Salary:

Responsibilities

• Define electrical requirements, architecture, interface contracts, and validation plans for robot subsystems.
• Design schematics and PCB layouts; select components and manage prototyping, fabrication, assembly, and revisions.
• Design power distribution, grounding, protection, connectors, and harnesses appropriate to motors, sensors, and embedded compute.
• Integrate sensors, actuators, and motor controllers, including embedded interfaces and bring-up firmware as needed.
• Use bench measurements and repeatable tests to isolate faults, including intermittent noise, power, and communication failures.
• Validate electrical behavior on the assembled robot and resolve integration risks with mechanical and software colleagues.
• Deliver design files, bills of materials, harness documentation, firmware interfaces, and acceptance tests; own reliability improvements after handoff.

Requirements

 
• Evidence of independently owning a complex electrical subsystem, including personally designing a PCB and taking it through fabrication, bring-up, and integration.
• Strong practical analog and digital fundamentals, power electronics, and signal integrity.
• Confidence using oscilloscopes, multimeters, bench supplies, and other measurement tools to test hypotheses and diagnose failures.
• Experience connecting sensors or actuators to microcontrollers, embedded compute, or control software.
• Ability to reason about grounding, noise, protection, thermal limits, and failure modes in an assembled system.
• Ability to communicate tradeoffs, resolve cross-disciplinary interfaces, and document designs and measurements for others.

Nice to have

 

• Robotics, motor control, force or tactile sensing, or synchronized sensor acquisition.
• Embedded C or C++, Python test tooling, and interfaces such as CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, or Ethernet.
• EMI troubleshooting, harness design, design for manufacturing, and repeated hardware builds.

What Success Looks Like

• Deliver an agreed electrical subsystem with verified interfaces and measurable acceptance criteria.
• Bring up and validate the subsystem on the robot, with tests that expose likely and intermittent failures.
• Make subsequent builds and maintenance predictable through clear documentation, diagnostics, and feedback-driven fixes.

About our Roles and Titles

At Tutor, we believe great engineers and researchers are defined by what they build and the impact they have — not where they sit in an org chart or what title they have. Therefore, everyone in our R&D org holds the title Member of Technical Staff (MoTS). Our job postings use standard titles so you can find us, but if you join Tutor, you'll be a MoTS — with a level that is determined through the interview process.

That also means we hire people, not slots. Work at Tutor evolves every quarter, and we set the expectation of flexibility from day one — it's common for people to start on one thing and shift to another based on where the team needs them most. A high technical bar across the board is what makes that flexibility possible: it's what allows people to contribute meaningfully whatever problem they take on.