Staff Hardware Engineer, Robotics Systems & Deployments

The posting, as Nidus Technologies wrote it

ABOUT US

Nidus is building autonomous manufacturing systems powered by AI and robotics. U.S. manufacturers are under growing pressure to increase output while navigating workforce constraints, underutilized equipment, and increasingly complex supply chains. We believe the next generation of manufacturing will be enabled by more intelligent, flexible automation—systems that help people and machines work together to expand capacity and improve productivity.

We're building the intelligence layer that makes that possible.

Our team comes from the intersection of defense technology and AI. We've built and shipped products to DoD customers, and we bring deep experience across ML, robotics, product development, and defense.

We're a small, in-person team in New York City working on hard problems that matter. If you want to build the future of American manufacturing, we'd love to hear from you.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are building vision-language-action models that enable robots to perform complex manipulation tasks in real-world environments. The quality, reliability, and scalability of the hardware used to collect data and deploy these systems are fundamental to our success.

We are looking for a Staff Hardware Engineer to define and lead the technical architecture for our robotic data-collection platforms, end effectors, camera systems, and customer workcells. You will own major hardware programs from early requirements and system architecture through validation, production, and fleet deployment.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad technical influence and a clear path to leadership. You will establish engineering standards, resolve complex cross-disciplinary tradeoffs, lead high-risk design efforts, and create reusable hardware platforms that can support new manipulation tasks, robot embodiments, and customer environments.

You will remain deeply hands-on—designing hardware, building prototypes, reviewing test data, and troubleshooting systems in the field—while also raising the technical bar across the organization through design reviews, mentorship, and long-range technical planning.

You will work closely with robotics, controls, machine learning, data operations, manufacturing, safety, and customer deployment teams.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP

• Define the technical architecture and long-term roadmap for robotic data-collection systems and customer-deployed workcells.
• Translate company, product, model-training, and customer requirements into scalable hardware platforms and subsystem specifications.
• Own system-level tradeoffs across mechanical design, sensing, controls, compute, safety, reliability, manufacturability, serviceability, cost, and deployment speed.
• Identify the highest-risk technical problems, establish validation strategies, and drive programs from ambiguous requirements to reliable deployed systems.
• Establish design principles, interfaces, qualific

[…]
ualification, lifecycle, and reliability tests for complex hardware.

• Strong systems-engineering judgment and the ability to make clear tradeoffs among performance, schedule, reliability, cost, manufacturability, and serviceability.
• Experience leading design reviews, resolving cross-functional technical disagreements, and influencing engineering direction without relying on formal authority.
• Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, operators, suppliers, executives, and customers.
• Willingness to work hands-on with hardware and travel to customer sites as needed.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience developing robotic grippers, custom fingers, tool changers, compliant mechanisms, tactile or force-sensing systems, or other manipulation hardware.
• Experience architecting industrial robot, cobot, laboratory automation, warehouse automation, or machine-vision workcells.
• Experience developing hardware used specifically for robot learning, teleoperation, demonstration collection, or large-scale robotics datasets.
• Experience with machine safety and robotics standards such as ISO 10218, ISO/TS 15066, ANSI/RIA R15.06, or related customer-site requirements.
• Experience with DFMEA, fault-tree analysis, tolerance analysis, accelerated lifecycle testing, environmental qualification, and formal engineering change control.
• Experience managing technical relationships with strategic suppliers, contract manufacturers, and external system integrators.

Nidus Technologies is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.

We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, even if you don't feel like you're a perfect fit. If you're passionate about contributing to our mission, we'd love to hear from you!