Senior EMC / Power Integrity Engineer — Onsite Denver Robot Brownout Troubleshooting

We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on EMC/EMI and power-integrity engineer to help us solve a difficult intermittent electrical problem on an industrial autonomous mobile robot (AMR). This is not a remote-only consulting engagement. You must be able and willing to work onsite with our engineering team in the Denver, Colorado area.** Some analysis can be performed remotely, but we specifically need an expert who can physically work on the robot, make measurements, modify the system, and run experiments with our team. The Problem We have a 48 V battery-powered industrial robot that intermittently experiences a brownout/reboot when making electrical contact with its automatic charging station. This has been a difficult, long-running field reliability issue and is now a high-priority engineering problem for our company. Recent onsite testing has identified a significant transient associated with docking. Measurements have shown approximately 700–800 V relative to earth/chassis lasting roughly 10–20 ms during charging-contact engagement. Several potential causes have already been investigated, but we have not yet conclusively identified: * The source of the transient * The coupling/current path through the robot * The electrical mechanism that causes the IPC/control electronics to reboot * A verified, production-ready mitigation We are not looking for someone to simply provide additional theories or write a report. We need an engineer who is comfortable getting hands-on with the hardware, forming hypotheses, rapidly designing experiments, making measurements, modifying the system, and testing until we have a robust solution. What We Need You to Do Work alongside our electrical engineer and development team to: * Reproduce the failure in our Denver lab * Instrument the robot and charging system during docking * Capture the transient and the actual brownout event * Determine whether the disturbance is differential-mode, common-mode, grounding/bonding related, or another mechanism * Identify how the disturbance couples into the robot's control electronics * Measure critical nodes including the 48 V battery bus, 24 V DC/DC output, IPC power input, PCB power input, chassis, battery negative, and charging interface * Evaluate grounding and bonding strategy * Evaluate DC/DC converter behavior during the event * Investigate conducted and radiated transient paths * Design and rapidly test practical mitigations Potential mitigations may include: * TVS/transient suppression * Common-mode filtering * Ferrites * Grounding/bonding changes * Controlled discharge paths * Input filtering * Bulk/hold-up capacitance * Supercapacitor/UPS buffering * Isolation * Charging-interface modifications * Other solutions identified through testing The ultimate objective is not merely to explain the waveform. The objective is to make the robot reliably immune to the event and prove the solution through repeated testing. Ideal Background We are particularly interested in engineers with substantial real-world experience in: * EMC/EMI troubleshooting * Power integrity * Transient susceptibility * Common-mode disturbances * Grounding and bonding * ESD/EFT/surge troubleshooting * IEC 61000-4-x immunity testing * 24 V / 48 V industrial power systems * Battery-powered equipment * DC/DC converters * Motor drives and servo systems * Industrial robotics, AGVs or AMRs * Oscilloscope troubleshooting * Differential and high-voltage probes * Current probes * Field failure/root-cause analysis * Designing EMC fixes for existing products Experience solving intermittent resets, processor/IPC brownouts, or similar problems in industrial equipment is particularly valuable. The Engineer We Are Looking For We value rapid empirical troubleshooting combined with strong electrical theory. We want someone who naturally works through problems using a process such as: Observe → Measure → Hypothesize → Design experiment → Modify → Test → Learn → Repeat You should be comfortable challenging existing assumptions—including those of our current engineering team—and testing competing hypotheses quickly. We are a robotics company dealing with a significant customer reliability problem, so speed and tangible results matter. Location Requirement Onsite availability in the Denver, Colorado area is required. Please do not apply if you can only provide remote consultation. We can discuss the exact onsite schedule, but we expect the initial engagement to include several concentrated days working directly with the robot and our engineering team. Engagement We envision this initially as a short, intensive troubleshooting engagement, potentially followed by additional consulting depending on the results. Our goal is to determine very quickly whether we have the right expert and then give that person access to the equipment and engineering team needed to attack the problem. When Applying Please do **not** send us a generic electrical-engineering proposal. Instead, briefly answer these questions: We are particularly interested in your answer to question #6. Please apply only if you have personally performed hands-on EMC/transient troubleshooting. We are not looking primarily for an EMC compliance/testing coordinator—we need someone who can diagnose and fix a difficult electrical problem on the hardware.