Vehicle Integration Technician

ASHFORD CONNEX, LLC; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

ASHFORD CONNEX, LLC in Austin, TX is seeking a Vehicle Integration Technician to retrofit autonomous systems on industrial vehicles. You will install a full hardware stack across electrical, mechanical, and CAN subsystems on forklifts, loaders, and diggers; plan to retrofit 200+ platforms over four years and help write the deployment playbook for the US.

The role requires 3–8 years of hands-on experience, a Bachelor's degree, and willingness to travel 25% to customer sites.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree required.
• 3–8 years of experience in related fields.
• Experience retrofit kits into autonomous machines.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites (25%).

Responsibilities

• Adapt platform hardware to fit each machine model.
• Build and install wiring harnesses, sensors and actuators.
• Visit customer sites to scope retrofit needs and perform installation.
• Troubleshoot integration across electrical, mechanical and software layers.
• Record issues and improve Vehicle Adapter Kits; ECU programming is a plus.

Skills

Electrical wiring

Mechanical assembly

CAN/J1939

Robotics integration

Hands-on builder

Education

Bachelor’s Degree

Tools

ECU programming

Job description

TITLE: Vehicle Integration Technician

ENVIRONMENT :AI, Industrial

LOCATION :Austin, TXHybrid

COMPENSATION RANGE :$120,000.00 - $185,000.00DOQ

DEGREE REQUIREMENTS:Bachelor’s Degree

CITIZENSHIP:Open to H1B, OPT transfers

TRAVEL: 25% to customer sites

EXPERIENCE LEVEL:3 – 8 years experience

POSITION SUMMARY:

We are building the future of intelligent load handling by making industrial machines — forklifts, wheel loaders, diggers, and more — fully autonomous with "silicon brains." The company's machine‑agnostic intelligence platform lets any machine, on any site, perceive, decide, and act autonomously. One platform. Any machine. No fleet replacement.

We are looking for a Vehicle Integration Technician with 4+ years of experience retrofit kits into working autonomous machines on real industrial vehicles. We need a hands‑on, multi‑skilled builder from automotive, robotics, autonomous driving, or heavy machinery who can install a full hardware stack (electrical, mechanical, and CAN) on a specific machine. We plan to retrofit 200+ vehicle platforms over the next four years, including forklifts, wheel loaders, and diggers of every brand. You'll be one of the first technical hires at the new Austin location, and you'll help write the playbook for deploying autonomy in the US.

The vision: one operator managing hundreds of machines simultaneously, with productive machine‑hour cost dropping by 80x — unlocking the next productivity revolution in physical work.

What will you be doing?

• Adapting our standard platform hardware (power distribution, harnesses, sensors, compute, controllers) to fit each machine model. Most of the kit already exists, and you'll engineer the last 10% that makes it fit.
• Building and installing wiring harnesses, connectors, mounting brackets, sensors, and actuators on vehicles, then bringing them up through continuity, voltage, power, and CAN/J1939 checks.
• Going to customer sites to scope what each retrofit needs, then running installation, commissioning, debugging, and acceptance testing.
• Troubleshooting integration problems across the electrical, mechanical, and software layers, and sending clear change requests back to the platform engineering teams.
• Recording build issues and lessons learned to make Vehicle Adapter Kits better and more repeatable. ECU or low‑level embedded programming experience is a big plus.