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. 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. Turn concepts into working hardware quickly, evaluation kits, breadboards, and quick-turn PCBs, hand-assembled and reworked in house.

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. 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.

Work the whole range of the problem, architecture, embedded and analog design, detailed layout, debug, and board- and system-level testing.

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.

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. 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.

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. in Electrical Engineering or equivalent. ~7+ years of hardware design experience in a relevant field — robotics, safety-critical, medical, aerospace, or automotive.



~ Genuinely hands-on in the lab: comfortable assembling and reworking your own boards, including fine-pitch and BGA rework, and building fixtures to get a measurement you trust. ~ Proficient with standard lab instrumentation — DMM, oscilloscope, power supply, function generator — plus spectrum analyzer and near-field probes. ~ You can scope a prototype to answer one question, resist gold-plating it, and change direction when the data says to. ~ Experience across the full development cycle, and a history of designs that shipped and held up in the field. Prototyping here is the front end of a real product, not a lab exercise. ~ Bonus Qualifications Experience with electronics design and simulation tools — Altium, or comparable SI/PI simulation.

Enough embedded or scripting ability to bring up your own prototype without waiting on a firmware queue — C, Python, or similar. Exposure to rapid mechanical fabrication for prototype enclosures and brackets: 3D printing, laser cutting, basic machining. Standards and certification experience (UL, CSA, CE, and similar), including preparing technical files.

Experience with robots or complex electro-mechanical systems, and with safety-critical hardware. Familiarity with ROS, Linux-based operating systems, Jira, and Google Workspace. Previous experience operating or servicing industrial or commercial floor cleaning equipment. **We use artificial intelligence technology to assist in reviewing and screening applications for this position. #

📌 Senior Hardware Developer — Electronics Prototyping & EMC (Kitchener)
🏢 Avidbots
📍 Kitchener