Senior HIL Systems Engineer – Autonomous Bench

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k)

Paid parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Commuter benefits

Team lunch

Job summary

Atoms is seeking a Staff Systems Integration Engineer to own hardware-in-the-loop benches validating our autonomy stack off-vehicle. You will architect, build, instrument, automate, and document the full bench lifecycle, enabling software and autonomy teams to test against realistic scenarios.

The role emphasizes hands-on bench development, simulation of vehicle networks, data replay, and automated CI for repeatable tests, all within a fast-moving robotics company in San Francisco.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field is required, with 8+ years of relevant experience, or a master’s degree with 6+ years.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building hardware-in-the-loop or system-level test benches from initial architecture through commissioning, including bench topology, schematic capture, component selection, harness design, and bring-up.
• Hands-on experience with vehicle networks (CAN, CAN FD, LIN, Automotive Ethernet), including restbus simulation, network database authoring (DBC, LDF), and bus analysis tooling.
• Experience developing real-time plant, actuator, sensor, and power models and deploying them to real-time target hardware, whether model-based or hand-written.
• Proficiency in Python and a systems language (C, C++, or equivalent), with demonstrated experience building test automation frameworks and integrating them into continuous integration pipelines.
• Working experience with a robotics middleware and its logging and replay tooling, such as ROS (node development, rosbag, visualization) or an equivalent.
• Working knowledge of sensor and compute interfaces, including camera serialization (GMSL, FPD-Link), lidar and radar interfaces, and precision time synchronization (PTP/gPTP).
• Experience with fault injection and off-nominal testing, including forced faults, dropped frames, degraded sensor conditions, and loss-of-communication scenarios.
• Solid understanding of autonomous driving systems, including sensors, perception, sensor fusion, planning, controls, and vehicle dynamics.
• Experience delivering first-of-kind work in environments where requirements, vehicle platforms, and software are concurrently in development.
• Strong written documentation practice covering bench topology, test procedures, and failure analysis, sufficient for engineers who did not build the bench.

Responsibilities

• System Bench Architecture & Build: Own the design and construction of our system benches, including bench topology, electrical architecture, schematic capture, component selection and sourcing, harness design and fabrication, physical build, and commissioning.
• Establish and document the correlation between bench behavior and vehicle behavior, including where the bench diverges and what that means for test validity.
• Vehicle & Network Simulation: Simulate the vehicle systems that are not physically present on the bench, so that the autonomy compute operates against a complete simulated vehicle system.
• This includes generating the network traffic the absent controllers would produce, along with power and ignition states, drive-by-wire actuation, and body and charging behavior across CAN, CAN FD, and Automotive Ethernet.
• Implement the gateway and signal-override paths that allow an engineer to command any vehicle state, including states the base vehicle cannot readily produce.
• Sensor Data Replay: Implement replay of recorded sensor and vehicle data into the autonomy compute, time-synchronised to original timestamps and at full rate, so that on-road events become repeatable bench tests.
• Own the interfaces, data flows, and synchronization across subsystems, beginning with open-loop replay and architecting for closed-loop replay as a follow-on capability.
• Test Automation & Continuous Integration: Design and maintain the automated test frameworks that allow bench execution to be triggered by a code change, gate software releases, run unattended, and report results in a form that engineers outside the hardware team can interpret without assistance.
• Fault Injection & Off-Nominal Validation: Define and execute validation covering fault injection, degraded-mode and fail-operational behavior, redundant compute and power paths, and loss-of-communication conditions, in support of L4 requirements and the evidence a system safety case requires.
• Tooling Strategy & Sourcing: Own build-versus-buy decisions for bench hardware and software, and be accountable for the cost, lead time, and long-term maintenance burden of those decisions.
• Cross-Functional Support & Debugging: Support the autonomy, embedded, hardware, and vehicle integration teams as the primary users of the bench, including access, uptime, and monitoring.
• Lead root-cause analysis of system-level failures across sensor timing, drivers, harnessing, and compute, and convert findings into design changes and documented corrective actions upstream.
• Engineering Standards & Documentation: Establish automotive-grade conventions for bench schematics, circuit naming, labeling, harness documentation, and configuration control, and hold internal teams and suppliers to them.
• Lead design reviews and bring engineers and technicians up to speed on the bench and how to troubleshoot it.

Skills

Python

C/C++

ROS

Automotive Ethernet

CAN/CAN FD

System-level testing

Documentation

Education

Bachelor's in Electrical/Computer/Mechanical Eng or CS

Tools

Schematic capture

CAN databases (DBC/LDF)

CI pipelines

Test automation frameworks

Job description

Atoms is seeking a Staff Systems Integration Engineer to own hardware-in-the-loop benches validating our autonomy stack off-vehicle. You will architect, build, instrument, automate, and document the full bench lifecycle, enabling software and autonomy teams to test against realistic scenarios.

The role emphasizes hands-on bench development, simulation of vehicle networks, data replay, and automated CI for repeatable tests, all within a fast-moving robotics company in San Francisco.