Principal Hardware Engineer

About the role

Prime Robotics is looking for an experienced Principal Hardware Engineer who works across three modes depending on where the urgency is: fix, build, and design.

• Fleet Reliability: Fix Mode
  • Work alongside field technicians to understand what is failing, in what conditions, and how often.
  • Diagnose complex electrical failures: wiring faults, grounding problems, PCB issues, power system failures, sensor degradation in harsh environments.
  • Prioritize which failures matter most to customer uptime and drive the engineering decisions that fix them at the root.
  • Establish diagnostic standards and repair methodology the field team can execute consistently.
  • Track bad-fix rates and first-visit resolution; use that data to drive design improvements.
• Production Quality: Build Mode
  • Own electrical quality on robots being built in Denver, wiring standards, grounding practices, inspection criteria.
  • Support the Arctic RackBot build for freezer deployment: ensure electrical systems are robust for -10°F continuous operation.
  • Work with assemblers to catch issues during build rather than after deployment.
• Hardware Design for Reliability: Design Mode
  • Partner with our China R&D team to improve PCB designs for robustness, this is one of the highest-leverage things we can do for long-term fleet reliability.
  • Drive design improvements in wiring harnesses, connector choices, grounding architecture, and environmental protection.
  • Contribute to next-generation robot variants including RackBot 2.0 and MobilePallet improvements.
  • Apply design-for-reliability thinking, reduce failure modes before robots ship rather than fixing them in the field.
• International Team Coordination: Lead our international engineering team on hardware development, this requires regular evening availability to overlap with China time zones.
• Review and provide feedback on designs coming from China with a reliability and field-serviceability lens.

Requirements

• Deep electrical systems fluency, wiring, grounding, PCB-level diagnosis, power systems, EMI.
• Experience with autonomous robots or complex electromechanical systems deployed in real-world environments, not just lab or prototype work.
• Ability to sit down with a field technician, understand what they are seeing, and make good engineering judgments about root cause and priority.
• Hands-on orientation, you are comfortable doing the work yourself, not just reviewing others' work.
• Strong Preferences:
  • Experience with robots operating in harsh environments: temperature extremes, dust, vibration, and wet conditions.
  • Background in designing for reliability, not just performance, connector selection, harness design, grounding schemes, environmental sealing.
  • Experience working with Chinese engineering and manufacturing teams, understanding the culture and how to drive results across time zones is a genuine advantage.
  • Design-for-manufacturing mindset: you think about how a design will be built and serviced, not just how it will perform.