Electrical Engineer, Humanoid Robotics

About the Role

As an Electrical Engineer on the Humanoids Team at FieldAI, you will work on advanced perception, compute, and manipulation systems for humanoid robotics. You will collaborate closely with advanced ML teams to ensure our robots can complete increasingly complex tasks. Your work will span power systems, high-speed communication, and PCB design, ensuring our systems are electrically robust, safe, and scalable. Responsibilities may span the full lifecycle from electrical CAD through production to field support. You will collaborate with mechanical, sensor, and compute teams to build tightly integrated solutions ready for deployment in challenging field environments.

Responsibilities

• Electrical System Design
  • Power Architecture: Design regulated power systems including voltage rails, DC/DC converters, switches, fuses, and grounding schemes.
  • Wire Harness Design: Design and document robust wire harnesses for power and data lines, including shielding, strain relief, and standard connectors.
  • PCB Design: Create PCBs for power distribution, protocol bridging, and embedded control.
  • Networking & Communication: Architect wired and wireless communication systems (Ethernet, USB, CAN, I2C, WiFi, 5G).
  • Budgets & Tolerances: Maintain system-level power and bandwidth budgets. Ensure electrical tolerance to noise, EMI, and vibration.
• Electrical System Implementation
  • CAD & Schematics: Create PCB schematics, harness diagrams, pinouts, and complete PCB BOMs using tools like KiCAD or Altium.
  • Calculations: Conduct electrical calculations including current draw, peak power, signal integrity, and fault analysis.
  • Design for Field Conditions: Engineer for EMI/EMC robustness, thermal resilience, and fault isolation under field operating conditions.
  • Testing: Conduct power validation (noise, load, transients), communication tests (bandwidth, latency), and EMI evaluation.
  • Integration: Collaborate with sensor, compute, and mechanical teams to ensure end-to-end system compatibility and robustness.
  • Documentation & Budgets: Maintain PCB schematics and systems-level wiring diagrams. Manage system-level power and data bandwidth budgets.
• Electrical System Production & Servicing
  • Build: Work with vendors and contract manufacturers to procure PCBs and harnesses. Develop QA checks for incoming units.
  • Debug: Investigate system faults using logs, oscilloscopes, analyzers, and power monitors.
  • Support: Provide hands-on support during integration, deployment, and servicing in the field.

Requirements

• Education: B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
• Experience Level: Open to entry-level engineers through senior and staff engineers.
• Power Systems: Experience designing and testing low-voltage regulated power systems.
• Harnessing: Hands-on design and integration of custom wire harnesses for robotics or automotive-style systems.
• PCB Design: Proficiency in PCB schematic and layout using KiCAD, Altium, or equivalent tools.
• Communication Protocols: Familiarity with USB, Ethernet, CAN, I2C, GMSL, and wireless technologies.
• Testing & Debugging: Skills using electrical test tools including oscilloscopes, power analyzers, and EMI/EMC setups.
• Documentation: Ability to produce detailed electrical documentation for design, manufacturing, and servicing.
• Systems Thinking: Experience working across mechanical, compute, and autonomy teams to deliver robust integrated systems.
• Cross-Functional Robotic Skills: Ability to contribute electrical, sensing, and embedded computing work to deliver robust integrated systems.

Skills That Set You Apart

• Experience taking systems from prototype to large-scale production.
• Experience developing systems for harsh field environments.
• Experience working on robotics deployed in real-world settings such as autonomous vehicles, drones, or ruggedized robots.
• Fluency across electrical, mechanical, and software systems.
• Background in fault protection, EMI/EMC compliance, and safety-critical design.

About FieldAI’s Irvine Team

FieldAI’s Irvine team is where embodied AI meets real robots, real sensors, and real field deployments. Based in the heart of Southern California’s robotics ecosystem, we build risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems that solve the hardest problems in robotics and unlock the full potential of embodied intelligence. We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-only architectures, combining rigorous engineering with learning systems proven in globally deployed solutions that deliver results today and improve with every deployment.

The Hardware Team at FieldAI develops perception and compute payloads that power autonomous robotics systems in complex real-world environments. Our work spans the full hardware stack, designing and integrating sensing systems (LiDAR, camera, TOF, IMU, GPS), embedded compute (CPUs, GPUs, microcontrollers, Linux, ROS), electrical systems (power distribution, communication), and mechanical components (structures, thermal regulation, ingress protection). The team focuses on both development (research, design, prototyping, testing) and operations (production, testing, QA, debugging).

Why Join FieldAI in Irvine?

• Work where the robots are: build and test systems on real hardware with real sensors, then ship them to operate in unstructured, previously unknown environments around the world.
• Solve one of robotics’ hardest challenges: reliable deployment outside the lab.
• Collaborate with a world-class team that thrives on creativity, resilience, and bold thinking, bringing deep experience from organizations such as DeepMind, NASA JPL, Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, Amazon, Tesla Autopilot, Cruise, Zoox, Toyota Research Institute, and SpaceX.
• Be part of a team with a track record of field deployments and strong performance in DARPA challenge segments.
• Join a growing team building operational systems and procedures from the ground up, with a focus on improving core capabilities, system reliability, and system scalability.