Senior/Staff Actuator Test & Equipment Engineer

Job description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality. As an Actuator Test & Equipment Engineer, you will design, build, and operate the test infrastructure that turns actuator models into validated hardware. Every torque curve, every efficiency map, every life prediction we trust starts on a test stand you designed. Without rigorous, well-instrumented, high-throughput test capability, the rest of the actuator team is guessing. In this role, you own the dynos, gear test rigs, cooling benches, and durability fixtures that characterize our motors, gear trains, and complete actuators. You decide what gets measured, how accurately, and how fast — and you partner with technicians and modeling engineers to make sure the data we generate actually answers the questions we're asking. We operate as T-shaped engineers. You must be a strong generalist across mechanical, electrical, and software aspects of test systems, but your superpower for this role is building and running high-fidelity electromechanical test equipment that produces data engineers can stake decisions on. WHAT YOU'LL DO Dyno Development: Design and build motor dynos, actuator dynos, and back-to-back test setups for performance and efficiency characterization across the full speed-torque envelope. Specify load motors, torque transducers, encoders, drives, and the mechanical structure that keeps everything aligned at speed. Gear Test Capability: Develop 4-square gear testing setups for high-cycle, low-energy gear life and efficiency testing. Build the rigs that let us run millions of cycles at representative loads without paying for every joule of input energy. Cooling Test Benches: Build cooling test benches that characterize motor and actuator thermal behavior — coolant flow, heat rejection, temperature rise under load — and validate the thermal models that drive our cooling architecture. Durability & Cycling Equipment: Design housing cycling test equipment and other durability rigs that exercise actuators against representative duty cycles, environmental conditions, and failure modes. Data Acquisition Architecture: Define data acquisition requirements — sample rates, sensor accuracy, synchronization, filtering, storage — in close partnership with the modeling engineer. The data you collect must be good enough to validate models and inform design decisions, not just good enough to look at. Test Execution & Throughput: Work closely with the actuator technician to make sure tests are run promptly and efficiently. Build the procedures, fixtures, and software tooling that turn a test stand into a high-throughput piece of capital equipment rather than a one-off experiment. Test Plan Development: Partner with design and modeling engineers to define test plans for component characterization, model correlation, and durability validation. Push back when a plan won't actually answer the question being asked. Data Integrity & Reporting: Own the integrity of the data leaving your test stands — calibration, traceability, uncertainty quantification — and the clarity of the reports that go back to design and modeling. WHAT YOU'LL BRING Education: Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related field. Experience: 5+ years developing and operating test equipment for electromechanical systems — motors, drivetrains, actuators, transmissions, or similar. At least one program where you owned a test capability from blank sheet through routine production use. Core Fundamentals: Strong grasp of the physics being measured — motor torque-speed behavior, gear efficiency, heat transfer, vibration — and the instrumentation that captures it. You know what an honest measurement looks like and what a misleading one looks like. Technical "Superpower": Deep proficiency in dyno design and electromechanical test rig development. You can size a load motor, select a torque transducer, design a coupling that won't add measurement error, and build the control software that ties it all together. Instrumentation & DAQ: Hands-on experience with torque transducers, encoders, current/voltage measurement, thermocouples/RTDs, accelerometers, and the data acquisition systems that read them (NI, dSPACE, Speedgoat, custom, etc.). Comfortable specifying sample rates, anti-aliasing, and synchronization for multi-domain measurements. Engineering Tools: Proficiency in CAD for fixture and rig design, and in MATLAB, Python, or LabVIEW for test automation and data analysis. The "Owner" Mindset: First-principles thinking, strong written communication, and the discipline to treat data quality as a non-negotiable. The downstream team is making million-dollar decisions on your numbers. BONUS POINTS (THE "PLUS" LIST) Motor & Drive Depth: Hands-on experience commissioning servo drives, tuning current/velocity/position loops, and characterizing PMSM/BLDC motors across full operating envelopes. Gear Testing: Experience with 4-square (back-to-back) gear rigs, FZG-style testing, or precision gear efficiency measurement. Familiarity with the failure modes of harmonic, cycloidal, or planetary gear systems. Thermal & Fluid Testing: Background in coolant loop design, calorimetry, or motor thermal characterization. Test Automation: Experience building automated test sequences, unattended overnight runs, and the data pipelines that turn raw captures into analyzed results without manual touchpoints. Reliability & Life Testing: Familiarity with B-life qualification, accelerated life testing, and the statistics of designing a durability test that actually proves something. Robotics or High-Performance Automotive: Prior experience testing actuators for legged robots, manipulators, EVs, or motorsport applications.