Electrical Design Engineer, Tactile Sensing

About this role

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Own the tactile sensor stack electrically — from transducer interface and analog front-end through signal conditioning, digitization, and delivery of clean, time-stamped data to downstream compute.

- Design low-noise analog front-ends for high-channel-count tactile arrays across one or more modalities (capacitive, resistive/piezoresistive, magnetic, optical, piezoelectric, MEMS/barometric), including amplification, filtering, ADC selection, and calibration strategy.

- Architect multiplexing and scanning schemes for dense taxel arrays, including crosstalk mitigation, drive/sense electrode design, and trade-offs between spatial resolution, sample rate, and power.

- Design high-density flex, rigid-flex, and ultra-compact PCBs for volume-constrained, cable-routed assemblies — fingertips, palms, gripper surfaces, and data collection gloves.

- Deliver deterministic, tightly synchronized sampling: design clocking, triggering, and timestamping architectures that meet sub-millisecond synchronization requirements with the robot's real-time actuator bus and ML data collection pipelines.

- Ensure EMI/ESD robustness — shielding, grounding, and filtering strategies for sensors operating millimeters from motors and power electronics in factory environments.

- Characterize sensor electrical performance — noise floor, SNR, bandwidth, drift, hysteresis, temperature sensitivity — and build the electrical side of characterization rigs alongside mechanical ground-truth fixtures.

- Bring up boards hands-on: schematic capture, layout review, first-article debug, firmware-adjacent driver and calibration work in collaboration with the firmware team.

- Contribute to DFM/DFA so sensor electronics scale from low-volume prototypes to high-volume production; work with PCB fabricators, assembly houses, and contract manufacturers to keep parts on spec and on time.

- Collaborate cross-functionally with mechanical, firmware, controls, and ML teams to translate raw transducer signals into calibrated, usable manipulation feedback.

QUALIFICATIONS

- Exceptional analog and mixed-signal intuition. You understand noise sources, parasitics, and signal integrity instinctively.

- 5+ years of experience (or equivalent "hard tech" projects) designing sensor electronics, analog front-ends, or high-channel-count data acquisition systems.

- Direct experience with the readout electronics of at least one tactile or contact sensing modality — capacitive, resistive, optical/vision-based, magnetic, piezoelectric, MEMS, or barometric.

- Strong low-noise analog design skills: instrumentation amplifiers, precision references, filter design, ADC architectures, and calibration techniques.

- High proficiency in schematic capture and PCB layout (Altium or similar), including high-density flex and rigid-flex design.

- Solid embedded systems fluency: SPI/I2C/UART and high-speed serial interfaces, MCU selection and bring-up, and enough firmware capability to debug your own boards.

- Strong bench skills — oscilloscopes, LCR meters, spectrum/network analyzers — and a hands-on debugging approach with the ability to iterate quickly.

- Experience designing for volume manufacturing and working with PCB fabs, assembly houses, and contract manufacturers.

- You are comfortable with ambiguity, move fast, and have an "engineering curiosity" that drives you to understand how the entire system works, not just your part.

BONUS

- PhD or research experience in tactile sensing, electronic skin, neuromorphic/event-based sensing, or contact-rich manipulation.

- Experience with real-time industrial communication buses (EtherCAT, CAN-FD) and time synchronization protocols.

- Prior work instrumenting wearables or data collection gloves, including tethered high-bandwidth acquisition systems.

- DSP or ML-adjacent experience processing high-rate sensor streams into features or training data.

- Prior work on humanoid hands, dexterous grippers, haptic devices, or prosthetics.

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