Senior Electrical Engineer

Kovari develops frontier technology to transform physical businesses. They partner with established operators to change how they run, and build and operate businesses of their own through their subsidiaries.

Kovari is a small team of builders, operators, and researchers. They deploy on-site alongside the businesses they serve and iterate in the field. The company has raised over $6M from leading investors and is based in San Francisco.

THE OPPORTUNITY

You will own electrical subsystems of Kovari’s robots end to end, from concept through production, spanning power architecture and motor drives to sensors, harnesses, and embedded integration. You make architecture and design tradeoffs, design it, build it, bring it up, and debug it on robots running in live operations.

This is not a bench role. Your systems face real constraints: high duty cycles, continuous charging and discharging, noisy environments, and hardware that has to survive the field.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own electrical architecture and subsystem design from concept through production: power distribution, battery systems and BMS, charging, protection


• Select, integrate, and tune motor controllers and drives, making tradeoffs across performance, reliability, and manufacturability


• Design schematics and PCBs for power, sensing, and I/O, and lead PCB bring-up


• Integrate sensors: cameras, IMUs, encoders, force/torque, proximity


• Design and build wiring harnesses for reliability, serviceability, and robust power delivery


• Work with embedded and controls on firmware, comms buses (CAN, EtherCAT, RS-485), and bring-up


• Debug electrical failures on deployed robots and drive fixes back into the design


• Manage vendors and manufacturers for PCBs, harnesses, and custom assemblies, and mentor junior engineers

YOU SHOULD HAVE

• 5+ years of relevant industry experience designing and shipping hardware


• Strong fundamentals in power electronics, motor drives, and mixed-signal design


• Track record owning electrical subsystems from concept through production


• Schematic capture and PCB layout in Altium or KiCad


• Experience with PCB bring-up, power, motor control, and embedded integration


• Battery system experience: Li-ion packs, BMS, thermal and safety design


• Harness design: connector selection, strain relief, routing, documentation


• Hands-on skill: you solder, scope, and rework boards yourself


• Experience making architecture and design tradeoffs, mentoring junior engineers, and working with vendors and manufacturers


• A bias toward action: prototype fast, test early, fix what breaks

NICE TO HAVE

• A portfolio of hardware you’ve shipped and projects you’ve built on your own time