Project description:

Are you passionate about technology? So are we!
To strengthen our team of experts at our client in the robotics industry, we’re looking for a full-time Robotics Systems Tester at K-tronik.
We look forward to getting to know you in person—and to working together with passion and team spirit on exciting projects and cutting-edge technologies.

Tasks:

Hardware-Software Integration Testing

• Design and execute integration test protocols for the hand control stack: motor driver boards, embedded compute modules, sensor interfaces, and the communication backbone (DDS over TSN Ethernet and SPI)
• Develop hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test rigs to validate firmware behavior against actual actuator and sensor hardware—brushed DC and BLDC motor channels, absolute encoders, tactile sensor arrays, and IMUs
• Define and automate bring-up test sequences for new PCB revisions: power-on checks, bus enumeration, driver smoke tests, and channel-by-channel functional validation
• Own the integration test protocol for the forearm-to-body elbow interface: DDS topic correctness, latency measurement, link-loss behavior, and safe-state transitions under fault injection
• Test the full closed-loop control pipeline end-to-end: sensor input → embedded inference → motor command → physical response, with instrumented ground truth at each stage
• Instrument and measure system timing: control loop jitter, DDS publish latency per topic, NPU inference latency, and end-to-end perception-to-action latency against defined SLAs
• Validate mechanical-electrical interfaces: connector continuity throughout the range of motion, cable harness stress testing, and signal integrity under flexion cycles

Software Testing

• Build and maintain the software test suite covering: ROS 2 nodes and DDS topic pipelines, motion primitive state machines, grasp sequencer logic, and safety watchdog behavior
• Design unit and integration tests for the embedded inference pipeline: ONNX model output correctness versus CPU reference, ring buffer behavior, and multi-task DDS publishing under sustained load
• Implement regression test coverage for the control stack: position control loop stability, force ceiling enforcement, corrective tighten response timing, and arbitration logic between concurrent control modes
• Define and run fault injection tests in software: simulate link loss, sensor dropout, classifier confidence below threshold, and consecutive high-severity slip events—confirm that the system transitions to the correct safe state in every case
• Develop simulation-based tests when physical rigs are unavailable: URDF-based motion validation, kinematic limit checking, and trajectory feasibility prior to hardware deployment
• Maintain CI pipeline integration: automated test runs for every firmware and software commit, with clear pass/fail criteria and failure triage
• Own the benchmark test protocol for external hand platforms: define repeatable, instrumented test procedures

Test Infrastructure

• Select and deploy appropriate test tools across the stack: logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, force/torque sensors, motion capture or camera-based ground truth, data loggers
• Build a structured test results database: every test run logged with software version, hardware revision, configuration, and outcome—traceable and queryable
• Write test specifications that other engineers can execute independently and reproduce your results
• Define acceptance criteria for each subsystem before integration begins—not after

Qualifications:

Essential

• Degree in electrical engineering, mechatronics, computer science, or a related field; hands-on experience testing embedded systems: bring-up, bus protocols (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN), signal integrity measurement, and firmware debugging with real hardware
• Experience writing automated software tests in Python or C++—unit tests, integration tests, regression suites
• Ability to read and understand firmware and software well enough to identify what needs testing and where the edge cases are, without needing to write all the production code yourself
• Experience with instrumentation and measurement: oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, current probes — comfortable setting up a test bench and capturing what is actually happening
• Structured thinking about failure modes: given a system description, you should be able to enumerate the ways it can fail and design tests that would catch them

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with ROS 2, DDS middleware, or real-time communication systems
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing or physical test rig design
• Familiarity with motor control systems—brushed DC or BLDC—and the characteristic failure modes of position control, current limiting, and encoder feedback loops
• Experience building or contributing to CI/CD pipelines for embedded or robotics software
• Familiarity with force/torque measurement and tactile sensing systems
• Experience testing learned or probabilistic systems: validating model output distributions, testing confidence thresholds, and defining acceptable behavior under out-of-distribution inputs
• Background in or exposure to functional safety testing — understanding the difference between testing for correctness and testing for safety is a significant advantage

We offer: