{"id":1282229,"url":"https://alion.io/job/avidbots-senior-hardware-developer-electronics-prototyping-emc","title":"Senior Hardware Developer — Electronics Prototyping & EMC","company":{"id":58079,"name":"Avidbots","domain":"avidbots.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/avidbots","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"BambooHR","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Hardware","role_family":"Hardware","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Kitchener, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":88000,"max_usd":189000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":85},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Google Workspace","optional":false},{"name":"Jira","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"ROS","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T14:27:31Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":7,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":7},"description":"About Avidbots\nAvidbots is a robotics company with a vision to bring robots into everyday life to expand human potential. Headquartered in Kitchener, ON, we support customers on five continents. Our flagship products, the Neo and Kas autonomous floor scrubbing robots, are deployed worldwide and trusted by leading facilities and building service companies.\nThe Role\nWe're looking for a senior hardware developer who builds to think. This role sits in Research & Development, ahead of but supporting the production program, and its job is to turn open questions about our next generation of floor scrubbing robots into working hardware fast enough to answer them.\nYou'll take ideas from whiteboard to bench article in weeks dev kits, breadboards, quick-turn boards you lay out yourself and assemble in our lab, then instrument them, break them, and produce a defensible recommendation. Some of what you build will be thrown away on purpose. The parts that survive become the basis of what the production team inherits.\nThe specialization we need most is electromagnetic compatibility. A mobile robot puts high-current motor drives, switching converters, sensitive sensor front ends, radios, and LiDAR inside one steel frame, and EMC problems discovered late are expensive. We want them found on the prototype, on the bench, by someone who designed for them in the first place.\nKey Responsibilities\nPrototyping and bring-up\nTurn concepts into working hardware quickly, evaluation kits, breadboards, and quick-turn PCBs, hand-assembled and reworked in house.\nOwn bring-up and debug end to end, on iteration cycles measured in weeks rather than quarters.\nDesign and build the test jigs, fixtures, and instrumented benches that make results trustworthy.\nRun trade studies and bench experiments that settle architecture questions with measured data instead of opinion.\nJudge when a prototype is good enough to make the decision, and say so when it isn't.\nBoard and system design\nOwn schematic capture and multilayer PCB layout across analog, digital, and power domains: control boards, sensor interfaces, power distribution, safety circuits, and motor control units.\nContribute to system architecture and power distribution strategy for the next-generation platform.\nWork the whole range of the problem, architecture, embedded and analog design, detailed layout, debug, and board- and system-level testing.\nEMC, EMI, and signal integrity\nDesign for EMC from the first revision: stackup and impedance planning, ground and return-path strategy, partitioning of noisy and quiet domains, filtering, transient suppression, and shielding.\nDesign the power architecture for low emissions, converter selection and layout, switching-node containment, common-mode choke and filter design, and control of motor-drive noise coupling into sensor and communication buses.\nStand up and run in-house pre-compliance screening on prototypes: near-field probing, conducted and radiated emissions, ESD, EFT, and surge immunity. Diagnose findings down to the offending trace, cable, or component.\nSupport external test-house campaigns, plan, attend, triage failures, and drive the mitigation and re-spin.\nPartner with the mechanical team on harness and enclosure design: routing, segregation, shield termination, bonding, connector selection, and grounding of the chassis and drivetrain.\nSensors and evaluation\nEvaluate, select, and characterize sensor suites and mechatronics - 2D/3D LiDAR, Time-of-Flight sensors, drive encoders, and failsafe brakes - including head-to-head evaluation against real operating conditions.\nPrototype new hardware features, from first concept through demonstrable bench and robot-level function.\nSafety and path to production\nDesign with IEC 61508, IEC 63327, and IEC 60335-2-72 in view from the prototype stage, so architecture choices don't foreclose certification later.\nContribute to Hazard Analysis & Risk Assessment, FMEA, and FMEDA work alongside the functional safety lead.\nHand designs over cleanly: DFM feedback, BOM and second-source strategy, and the design intent the production and V&V teams need to carry it forward.\nKnowledge stewardship\nDocument the reasoning, not just the result. Capture what was tried and rejected, which component choices are load-bearing, and where the known failure signatures live, so the lessons of a prototype outlive the prototype itself.\nRequirements\nB.Sc. in Electrical Engineering or equivalent.\n7+ years of hardware design experience in a relevant field - robotics, safety-critical, medical, aerospace, or automotive.\nExcellent schematic and multilayer PCB layout skills, including mixed-signal and power layout. You should be able to defend a stackup, a ground scheme, and a return path.\nDemonstrated ownership of a product through EMC certification- you have taken a design into a chamber, failed, root-caused it, fixed it, and passed. Familiarity with the applicable emissions and immunity families (e.g. CISPR/EN 55014 or CISPR 11, the IEC 61000-4 immunity series, FCC Part 15 Subpart B, ICES-003).\nGenuinely hands-on in the lab: comfortable assembling and reworking your own boards, including fine-pitch and BGA rework, and building fixtures to get a measurement you trust.\nProficient with standard lab instrumentation - DMM, oscilloscope, power supply, function generator - plus spectrum analyzer and near-field probes.\nComfortable working from incomplete requirements. You can scope a prototype to answer one question, resist gold-plating it, and change direction when the data says to.\nExperience across the full development cycle, and a history of designs that shipped and held up in the field. Prototyping here is the front end of a real product, not a lab exercise.\nWorking knowledge of functional safety standards and hardware safety integrity metrics.\nStrong critical thinking, problem-solving, and organizational skills. A self-starter who is genuinely interested in robots.\nBonus Qualifications\nHands-on EMC troubleshooting depth: filter design, ferrite and choke selection, shielded cable termination, and closing out failed scans under schedule pressure.\nExperience with high-current brushless motor drives and their noise behaviour in a mobile platform.\nExperience with electronics design and simulation tools - Altium, or comparable SI/PI simulation.\nEnough embedded or scripting ability to bring up your own prototype without waiting on a firmware queue - C, Python, or similar.\nExposure to rapid mechanical fabrication for prototype enclosures and brackets: 3D printing, laser cutting, basic machining.\nStandards and certification experience (UL, CSA, CE, and similar), including preparing technical files.\nExperience with robots or complex electro-mechanical systems, and with safety-critical hardware.\nFamiliarity with laser product safety (IEC 60825) or intentional-radiator certification for embedded radios.\nFamiliarity with ROS, Linux-based operating systems, Jira, and Google Workspace.\nPrevious experience operating or servicing industrial or commercial floor cleaning equipment.\n**We use artificial intelligence technology to assist in reviewing and screening applications for this position.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7175,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotics","Retail & Commercial Robotics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T03:16:11Z"}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":6,"expected_fill_days":42,"reasons":["conf:4","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/avidbots-senior-hardware-developer-electronics-prototyping-emc","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/avidbots-senior-hardware-developer-electronics-prototyping-emc.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-02T00:45:29Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":742,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4258,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-03T00:00:00Z"}}}