Senior Sensor Engineer (f/m/d)

About TACTILIA

At TACTILIA, we are building the industry-ready robotic hand that closes one of the biggest gaps in Physical AI. Spun out of Schunk, the global market leader in gripping technology, we combine a decade of robotic-hand expertise and real industrial access with the speed and ambition of a deep-tech startup.

This isn't a research project waiting for its first customer. We already have a product, customers are ready to use it, and we are launching now. Your work will directly shape the electronics, actuators, and embedded systems that make that possible.

You will join at the moment when the hard engineering questions become real product decisions: how do we make a highly capable robotic hand reliable, manufacturable, serviceable, and simple enough to deploy on a real shop floor?

The Role

As a Senior Sensor Engineer (Tactile & Proprioception) at TACTILIA Robotics, you will build the neural architecture of physical touch and spatial awareness that gives our robotic hands human-like dexterity.

You will own the complete sensing architecture-from evaluating tactile technologies and proprioceptive layouts to designing readout electronics, calibration matrix algorithms, and real-time sensor pipelines.

Fitting high-density sensing skins, force feedback, and position tracking into a tight hand envelope means balancing signal integrity, low latency, and mechanical durability under high cyclic wear. You will work closely with Mechanics, Electronics, and Software to turn raw physical contact into clean, reliable data for real-time robotic control.

What you will do:

• Own the sensing architecture. Lead the evaluation, selection, and overall design of tactile and proprioceptive sensing systems across fingers, palm, and joints-built for modularity across product variants, not a one-off prototype.

• Develop tactile array hardware. Design and prototype high-resolution tactile sensors (optical, capacitive, piezoresistive, or magnetic) tailored for space-constrained, contact-rich finger pads and palm surfaces.

• Engineer proprioceptive feedback. Implement joint- and drive-level feedback mechanisms, including high-precision position/angle sensing, strain gauge force bridges, load cells, and tendinous tension tracking.

• Design readout electronics & AFEs. Build low-noise analog front-ends (AFEs), signal conditioning circuits, and local readout hardware optimized for minimal latency, wide dynamic range, and high immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI).

• Build calibration & processing pipelines. Implement automated calibration protocols, thermal/drift compensation matrix algorithms, and feature extraction (e.g., slip detection, contact point estimation) to feed clean telemetry to the software stack.

• Characterize & validate on real hardware. Own sensor testing on custom rigs-evaluating dynamic response, force linearity, hysteresis, spatial resolution, and long-term mechanical wear over hundreds of thousands of cycles.

• Drive sensor manufacturing & yield. Partner with specialized suppliers on Design for Manufacturing (DFM) for flexible/rigid-flex PCBs, molded tactile skins, and elastomeric components, ensuring high assembly yield and second-sourcing.

• Work across the whole team. Tight loop with Mechanics (for load paths and physical packaging), Electronics (for board interfaces), and Software (for state estimation and closed-loop grasp control).

What you bring:

• Degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Physics, Sensorics, Robotics, or a related field.

• 5-10 years of experience developing sensor hardware, mechatronic instrumentation, or sensor fusion systems, including at least one product taken into series production.

• Deep domain expertise in tactile sensing modalities (e.g., optical tactile/GelSight style, piezoresistive, capacitive) or high-density proprioceptive feedback (encoders, strain gauges, load cells).

• Proven experience in analog circuit design, signal conditioning (AFE), active filtering, and high-SNR data acquisition for physical sensors.

• Hands-on experience with sensor calibration techniques, thermal/hysteresis modeling, signal processing, and standard communication buses (SPI, I2C, CAN).

• Practical experience designing or integrating flexible PCBs, molded elastomers, or miniaturized mechatronic assemblies into tight physical envelopes.

• A strong hardware mindset: you enjoy lab bring-up, sensor characterization on test rigs, and tracing physics-to-signal anomalies with scopes and logic analyzers.

• Fluent in English; German is a plus, not a requirement.

Bonus:

• Background in real-time embedded C/C++ firmware or ROS/ROS2 for sensor data processing and filtering.

• Experience with tactile algorithms for slip prediction, texture recognition, or contact shape estimation.

• Experience with soft robotics, stretchable electronics, or conductive polymers.

• Knowledge of Machinery Regulation, ISO/TS 15066, and sensor design for collaborative applications.
  

The next chapter of robotics won't be built in a lab. It will be built by people who care about what happens when technology meets the real world.

At TACTILIA, you'll work on one of the hardest open problems in robotics: giving machines the dexterity, reliability, and robustness they need to interact with the physical world at industrial scale.

The technology is taking shape. The team is being built. And the standards for robotic hands and their skills are still wide open.

That means your decisions will have a lasting impact - not just on a product, but on what comes next for Physical AI.

Build the hand. Define the standard. Shape what comes next.

If you're excited by the challenge of building robotic hands that work reliably in the real world, we'd love to hear from you.

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