Associate Electrical Engineer
The company
Outrider, the pioneer in autonomous yard operations for logistics hubs, helps large enterprises improve safety, increase efficiency, and optimize their workforce. The only company exclusively focused on automating all aspects of yard operations, Outrider eliminates manual tasks that are hazardous and repetitive. Outrider’s mission is to drive the rapid adoption of sustainable freight transportation by deploying zero-emission systems. Outrider is a private company backed by NEA, 8VC, and other top-tier investors.
The role
In the Associate Electrical Engineer position, you'll be working as part of the hardware engineering team to create safe and reliable autonomous vehicle systems. You’ll be responsible for areas such as architecture, development, and testing of the electronic systems that enable our vehicles and supporting products. A primary early responsibility will be to improve the overall vehicle electronic architecture, while also diving deep on new electronic designs to implement that architecture.
The successful candidate will have a demonstrated history of contributing technically to the design and implementation of complex electronic systems in autonomous vehicles, robotic systems, or advanced sensing.
Duties and responsibilities
- Contribute to the development of system-level electronic architectures and subsystem-level designs
- Work on vehicle electrical architecture, design, implementation, and testing
- Help make complicated design trade-offs on system and sensor layout, electrical architecture and topology, and base vehicle system configurations
- Engage and collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Mechanical Engineering, Software Engineering, and Test Engineering, to develop complex electronic systems
- Contribute to small cross-functional teams to develop production-ready electronic subsystems (PCBs, firmware, wire harnesses, electronic enclosures, etc.) that can be manufactured at scale
- Support recruitment and training of talented engineers to build a world-class team
- Support field testing and debugging, both locally and at remote customer sites
- Debug wire harnesses, electronic assemblies, PCBs, and installed systems
- Evaluate new electronic components and their impact on system safety and performance
- Contribute technical assessments to strategic decision-making relating to electronic technology
- Travel to support customer deployments on-site (up to 25%)
Required qualifications
- 2+ years developing complex electrical and electronic systems
- Demonstrated ability to function as a technical contributor with limited supervision
- PCB design, assembly and rework experience, preferably in the automotive, trucking, or similarly challenging environment
- Wire harness design and debugging experience
- Firmware development for bare metal microcontrollers
- Demonstrated initiative and ability to deconstruct complex problems into discrete components
- Background in electronic troubleshooting for PCBs, wire harnesses, and data buses (e.g., CAN, RS-232)
- Experience designing for EMI/RFI isolation and shielding (including grounding techniques)
- Proficiency with multimeters and oscilloscopes
- Basic soldering, crimping, and electronic prototyping experience
- Excellent documentation and technical writing skills
Ideal qualifications
- Complex electronic system design experience
- Autonomous vehicle design experience
- Automotive systems design experience
- Electrical CAD experience, including simulation, schematic capture, PCB layout and wiring harness design
- Test software development background (Python preferred)
- Familiarity with safety-critical system design and development