Senior Functional Safety Engineer (ISO/TS 15066)

Role summary

You will join at the moment when the hard engineering questions become real product decisions: how do we make a highly capable robotic hand reliable, manufacturable, serviceable, and simple enough to deploy on a real shop floor?

Responsibilities

As an Electronics Engineer (Embedded Hardware & Firmware) at TACTILIA Robotics, you will help design and build the physical and low-level intelligence that brings our robotic hands to life.

You will own the complete embedded hardware and firmware stack—from schematics and high-density multilayer layouts to the real-time C/C++ firmware running directly on the metal.

Fitting multiple drives, high-density tactile arrays, and power electronics into a hand-sized volume means every decision is a tight balance of space, thermals, signal integrity, and manufacturability. You will work closely with the CTO and cross-functional team, moving smoothly between architecture, circuit design, and the lab to solve complex problems where physics meets code.

• Own the hardware architecture. Design schematics and high-density, multilayer PCB layouts (mixed-signal, tight thermal/EMC constraints) built for modularity across product variants—not a one-off prototype.
• Build control hardware and firmware that can't miss a beat. Search, evaluate, test, and integrate actuator hardware alongside motor drivers for compact servo drives; write deterministic real-time firmware (C/C++) for control loops, timing-critical execution, limit monitoring, and fault handling.
• Choose the right sensor and make the data mean something. Search, evaluate, test, and integrate sensor hardware for tactile sensing and proprioception (position and force); design low-noise readout electronics, signal conditioning, filtering, and calibration pipelines to deliver clean, low-latency telemetry to the software stack.
• Ship rock-solid bootloaders and drivers. Build field-updatable bootloaders, low-level drivers, and secure, fail-safe update strategies across product generations—documented and reliable, not tribal knowledge.
• Build interfaces customers actually want to integrate. Implement and maintain fieldbus and hardware communication layers (EtherCAT, CANopen, Ethernet) aligned cleanly with higher-level software and robot controllers.
• Debug on real hardware. Own the lab bring-up process from first power-on to full validation. Trace issues across the hardware, firmware, and mechanical boundaries with scopes, logic analyzers, and thermal imaging.
• Build security into the product from day one. Support Cyber Resilience Act compliance by integrating secure boot, signed firmware updates, and hardware-level trust mechanisms early in the design cycle.
• Build for series production, not just the lab. Design for manufacturing and test (DFM/DFT), select resilient supply-chain components with second sources, run EMC pre-compliance, and drive hardware through production ramp-up.
• Work across the whole team. Tight loop with Mechanics, Software, and System Applications—translating mechanical and control requirements into robust, deployable electronics.

Requirements

• A degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Robotics, or a related field.
• 5–10 years of experience developing embedded hardware and firmware for mechatronic products, including at least one product taken into series production.
• Proven expertise in schematic capture and multilayer PCB layout (Altium, KiCad, or similar), specifically for space-constrained, mixed-signal designs.
• Strong C/C++ skills on bare-metal or RTOS (ARM Cortex-M or similar) with a deep understanding of timing, concurrency, memory, and register-level hardware control.
• Hands-on experience with BLDC/DC motor driver design, current/velocity/position control loops, and low-level sensor interfacing.
• A strong hardware mindset: you enjoy lab bring-up, signal-integrity debugging, and getting to the bottom of transient issues with a scope or logic analyzer.
• Fluent English; German is a plus, not a requirement.

Nice to have

• Miniature electronics, high-density PCB packaging, or tight thermal constraints
• Tactile, force/torque, or contact-rich sensor arrays
• Real-time fieldbuses (EtherCAT, CANopen)
• Product security: secure boot, signed firmware, CRA, IEC 62443
• Functional safety standards (Machinery Regulation, ISO/TS 15066)

The next chapter of robotics won't be built in a lab. It will be built by people who care about what happens when technology meets the real world.

At TACTILIA, you'll work on one of the hardest open problems in robotics: giving machines the dexterity, reliability, and robustness they need to interact with the physical world at industrial scale.

The technology is taking shape. The team is being built. And the standards for robotic hands and their skills are still wide open.

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