Senior Hardware Developer in Kitchener

Avidbots is a robotics company with a vision to bring robots into everyday life to expand human potential. Headquartered in Kitchener, ON, we support customers on five continents. Our flagship products, the Neo and Kas autonomous floor scrubbing robots, are deployed worldwide and trusted by leading facilities and building service companies.

We're looking for a senior hardware developer who builds to think. This role sits in Research & Development, ahead of but supporting the production program, and its job is to turn open questions about our next generation of floor scrubbing robots into working hardware fast enough to answer them.

You’ll take ideas from whiteboard to bench article in weeks: dev kits, breadboards, quick-turn boards you lay out yourself and assemble in our lab, then instrument them, break them, and produce a defensible recommendation. Some of what you build will be thrown away on purpose. The parts that survive become the basis of what the production team inherits.

The specialization we need most is electromagnetic compatibility. A mobile robot puts high-current motor drives, switching converters, sensitive sensor front ends, radios, and LiDAR inside one steel frame, and EMC problems discovered late are expensive. We want them found on the prototype, on the bench, by someone who designed for them in the first place.

Key Responsibilities

• Prototyping and bring-up: Turn concepts into working hardware quickly, evaluation kits, breadboards, and quick-turn PCBs, hand-assembled and reworked in house.
• Own bring-up and debug end to end, on iteration cycles measured in weeks rather than quarters.
• Design and build the test jigs, fixtures, and instrumented benches that make results trustworthy.
• Run trade studies and bench experiments that settle architecture questions with measured data instead of opinion.
• Judge when a prototype is good enough to make the decision, and say so when it isn't.

Board and system design

• Own schematic capture and multilayer PCB layout across analog, digital, and power domains: control boards, sensor interfaces, power distribution, safety circuits, and motor control units.
• Contribute to system architecture and power distribution strategy for the next-generation platform.
• Work the whole range of the problem, architecture, embedded and analog design, detailed layout, debug, and board- and system-level testing.

EMC, EMI, and signal integrity

• Design for EMC from the first revision: stackup and impedance planning, ground and return-path strategy, partitioning of noisy and quiet domains, filtering, transient suppression, and shielding.
• Design the power architecture for low emissions, converter selection and layout, switching-node containment, common-mode choke and filter design, and control of motor-drive noise coupling into sensor and communication buses.
• Stand up and run in-house pre-compliance screening on prototypes: near-field probing, conducted and radiated emissions, ESD, EFT, and surge immunity.
• Diagnose findings down to the offending trace, cable, or component.
• Support external test-house campaigns, plan, attend, triage failures, and drive the mitigation and re-spin.
• Partner with the mechanical team on harness and enclosure design: routing, segregation, shield termination, bonding, connector selection, and grounding of the chassis and drivetrain.

Sensors and evaluation

• Evaluate, select, and characterize sensor suites and mechatronics — 2D/3D LiDAR, Time-of-Flight sensors, drive encoders, and failsafe brakes — including head-to-head evaluation against real operating conditions.
• Prototype new hardware features, from first concept through demonstrable bench and robot-level function.

Safety and path to production

• Design with IEC 61508, IEC 63327, and IEC 60335-2-72 in view from the prototype stage, so architecture choices don't foreclose certification later.
• Contribute to Hazard Analysis & Risk Assessment, FMEA, and FMEDA work alongside the functional safety lead.
• Hand designs over cleanly: DFM feedback, BOM and second-source strategy, and the design intent the production and V&V teams need to carry it forward.

Knowledge stewardship

• Document the reasoning, not just the result. Capture what was tried and rejected, which component choices are load-bearing, and where the known failure signatures live, so the lessons of a prototype outlive the prototype itself.

Requirements

• B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering or equivalent.
• 7+ years of hardware design experience in a relevant field — robotics, safety-critical, medical, aerospace, or automotive.
• Excellent schematic and multilayer PCB layout skills, including mixed-signal and power layout.
• Demonstrated ownership of a product through EMC certification.
• Genuinely hands-on in the lab: comfortable assembling and reworking your own boards.
• Proficient with standard lab instrumentation — DMM, oscilloscope, power supply, function generator — plus spectrum analyzer and near-field probes.
• Comfortable working from incomplete requirements.
• Experience across the full development cycle, and a history of designs that shipped and held up in the field.
• Working knowledge of functional safety standards and hardware safety integrity metrics.
• Strong critical thinking, problem-solving, and organizational skills.
• A self-starter who is genuinely interested in robots.

Bonus Qualifications

• Hands-on EMC troubleshooting depth.
• Experience with high-current brushless motor drives and their noise behaviour in a mobile platform.
• Experience with electronics design and simulation tools.
• Enough embedded or scripting ability to bring up your own prototype.
• Exposure to rapid mechanical fabrication for prototype enclosures and brackets.
• Standards and certification experience (UL, CSA, CE, and similar).
• Experience with robots or complex electro-mechanical systems.
• Familiarity with laser product safety or intentional-radiator certification for embedded radios.
• Familiarity with ROS, Linux-based operating systems, Jira, and Google Workspace.
• Previous experience operating or servicing industrial or commercial floor cleaning equipment.