Distinguished Hardware Development Engineer, Atlas

Boston Dynamics is looking for a Distinguished Hardware Development Engineer to join our Atlas Humanoid Team
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The Distinguished Hardware Development Engineer serves as an overall robot architect for the Atlas physical platform. In this role, you will lead cross-functional integration across actuation, structures, compute, power, sensing, and thermal teams, maintain system budgets and architectural baselines, and drive experiment design to validate system performance. As a principal individual contributor, you will resolve high-impact technical trade-offs, influence technical direction across the organization, mentor engineers across disciplines, and collaborate on future-generation Atlas architectures.

Boston Dynamics is a world leader in mobile robots, tackling some of the toughest robotics challenges. For years, our awe-inspiring viral videos on You Tube have shown the world what remarkably capable robots can do. Now we are quickly becoming a recognized leader in automation solutions for industrial applications and warehouse logistics.

• Lead the development of the existing Atlas physical architecture, including the robot-level configuration, module partitioning, and the interfaces between actuation, structures, compute, power, sensing, and thermal subsystems, and guide how it evolves across design iterations.
• Maintain and refine robot-level hardware requirements and the allocation of mass, power, thermal, volume, cost, and reliability budgets to module teams as product and behavior needs evolve.
• Work with module teams as their designs mature to optimize the interactions across module interfaces, resolving conflicts in fit, load paths, power, thermal, signal, and serviceability.
• Maintain the architectural baseline and interface definitions; manage robot-level CAD database and associated change control as the design evolves through prototypes, validation builds, and production.
• Lead system-level trade studies and architectural decisions across mechanical, electrical, embedded, and manufacturing domains, balancing performance, complexity, cost, and manufacturability.
• Design and drive experiments and analyses that quantify how well the hardware meets product needs; define the metrics that characterize hardware performance and turn the results into architectural and design decisions.
• Serve as an advisor to the systems engineering team on verification and validation, helping ensure plans and tests are appropriate: that they cover the right risks, reflect real product needs, and produce results that inform architectural decisions.
• Partner with software, compute, controls, and behavior engineers to translate robot capabilities and constraints into hardware requirements (and vice‑versa), and to resolve hardware/software interface decisions.
• Lead system-level architecture reviews and the design reviews where module designs integrate into the robot‑level baseline; identify and drive resolution of cross‑module integration risks.
• Champion design for manufacturing and assembly (DFM/DFA) of the top‑level robot assembly, working with manufacturing, sourcing, and quality teams so the architecture can be built, serviced, and scaled efficiently.
• Participate in system‑level risk mitigation, including FMEA, safety analysis, and reliability strategies (e.g., HALT).
• Mentor and coach engineers across disciplines in systems thinking, architecture, and technical decision‑making.

• Execution:
  Drives complex, cross‑disciplinary hardware development to successful outcomes. Uses experiments and data to make and defend architectural decisions, anticipates integration risks, and holds teams to system‑level commitments under tight schedules and shifting constraints.
• Colla…