Robotics Hardware Engineer, Reliability & Bring-up

Dyna Robotics; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Dyna Robotics in California is seeking a hands-on engineer to own the reliability of our humanoid robots through early-stage hardware bring-up and prototyping. You’ll collaborate across electrical, mechanical, software, and controls with a team that tackles hard problems and uses your findings to guide the next revisions.

This role is not desk-bound: expect substantial hands-on hardware work, including debugging, soldering, fixture and bracket design, and bench-level testing as we scale.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years in robotics, mechatronics, hardware test, or reliability engineering.
• Strong benchtop skills and the ability to repair and re-commission assemblies.
• Mechanical intuition about actuator failure modes and design causes.
• Proficiency in CAD and Altium, GD&T understanding, and drawing review.
• Firmware and motor control fundamentals, CAN, calibration, and zeroing.
• Experience with state-space robot control on real hardware.

Responsibilities

• Root-cause failures on prototype hardware, distinguishing hardware vs firmware or model issues.
• Work hands-on at the bench; test, rework, and repair actuators and electronics.
• Design, build, and improve mechanical parts, fixtures, brackets, and modifications.
• Build hardware health monitoring with metrics and telemetry pipelines.
• Develop calibration and test tooling, safety gates, and validation harnesses.
• Write runbooks, SOPs, and incident reports for hand-off.

Skills

Hands-on hardware work

Soldering

CAD

Altium

PCB debugging

State-space control

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Mechanical or electrical engineering degree

Tools

CAD tools

Altium

GD&T

Job description

Dyna Robotics builds general-purpose robots powered by a proprietary embodied AI foundation model with top-in-industry generalization and real-world performance. Already deployed with customers across multiple industries, our robots do commercial-grade work in the physical world. Our team comes from Google DeepMind, Meta, and Cruise, and we're backed by CRV, First Round, and other leading investors.

The Role

We're looking for a hands-on engineer to own the reliability of our humanoid robots through early-stage hardware bring-up and prototyping. The hardware is still taking shape, and that's the point: your findings feed directly into the next revision, and the tools and standards you build now will define how reliability works at Dyna as we scale.

One day you're writing a degradation analysis; the next you're pulling an arm off a robot, probing a driver board, soldering a fix, and designing the bracket that makes it stick. You'll work across electrical, mechanical, software, and controls alongside a small team of engineers and researchers who dig into hard problems with you, and you'll be the person they call when a robot does something nobody can explain.

This is not a desk job. Expect at least 20% of your time hands-on with hardware, often much more. It's a role for people who enjoy working without a playbook, move fast on their own, and find Type 2 fun in hard, ambiguous problems.

What You'll Do

• Root-cause failures on prototype hardware. Actuator dropouts, encoder drift, thermal events, CAN faults, and control-stack bugs, separating true hardware issues from firmware, calibration, and model-side causes.
• Work hands-on at the bench. Test, rework, and repair actuators and electronics, from soldering and harness work to re-commissioning components on rigs you build yourself.
• Design, build, and improve mechanical parts. Create fixtures, jigs, brackets, and robot modifications, and turn evidence about backlash, wear, and preload into concrete design changes with the mechanical team.
• Build hardware health monitoring. Develop metrics and alerts that catch real faults, and wrangle telemetry (MCAP, npz, episode archives) from bandwidth-constrained robots.
• Develop calibration and test tooling. Build calibration tools with safety gates, characterization sweeps for new hardware revisions, and validation harnesses, and review PRs across firmware, controls, and config.
• Document and hand off. Write runbooks, SOPs, and incident reports clean enough that a teammate can pick up the work cold.

What You'll Bring

• 5-10 years in robotics, mechatronics, hardware test, or reliability engineering, with significant time on early-stage robotic hardware.
• Strong benchtop skills (soldering, multimeter, calipers, wire harnesses, basic power tools) and the ability to tear down, repair, and re-commission electromechanical assemblies on your own.
• Mechanical intuition: how actuators fail through backlash, wear, preload loss, and end-stop damage, and how to connect physical evidence to design causes.
• Proficiency in CAD and Altium, a working understanding of GD&T, and the ability to review drawings.
• Firmware and motor control fundamentals: debugging PCBs, quasi-direct-drive actuators, encoders, CAN, and calibration and zeroing.
• Working knowledge of state-space robot control and how it behaves on real hardware.
• Strong data fundamentals and rigor about evidence (you know what a p-value actually represents).
• Experience working cross-functionally with researchers and engineers.

Bonus Points For

• Robotics startup experience
• Onshape
• Familiarity with simulation
• Building tools and SOPs that others actually adopt

At Dyna Robotics, we build technology for the real world, which requires a team as diverse as the environments our robots inhabit. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to technical rigor and mutual respect.

Don't let a checklist stop you. Data shows that underrepresented groups often only apply if they meet 100% of the criteria. We value problem-solving and grit over keyword matching. If you're passionate about robotics, no matter your discipline, we want to hear from you, even if you don't check every box.