# Harness Engineer

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Hardware Engineering
**Salary:** $266k – $380k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** wire harnesses, flexible printed circuits, fpc, connector selection, CAD, Nx, teamcenter, plm, reliability testing, failure analysis, electromechanical design, Prototyping, hardware debugging
**Posted:** 2026-07-17

> Senior Harness Engineer responsible for designing, integrating, and validating custom wire harnesses and FPCs for advanced robotic systems from architecture through production. Requires 7+ years experience, strong electromechanical intuition, and cross-functional collaboration with mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing teams.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom wire harnesses and/or flexible printed circuits (FPC).
- Build and validate prototypes through hands-on bring-up, debugging, characterization, and iterative refinement.
- Develop test methodologies and characterization infrastructure for wire harness performance, reliability, durability, and failure analysis.
- Analyze test data to identify limitations, failure modes, and opportunities for design improvement.
- Collaborate with manufacturing and supplier partners to transition designs from prototype to scalable production-ready assemblies.
- Contribute to wire harness sourcing strategy, vendor qualification, prototype builds, and supply-chain development.
- Document designs, interfaces, validation results, and engineering decisions to support long-term maintainability and production readiness.
- Help establish engineering standards, integration practices, and development workflows for future robotic platforms.

## Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechatronics, or a related field.
- 7+ years of experience designing and scaling custom wire harnesses and/or flexible printed circuits.
- Strong understanding of connector types across all size ranges and wire types.
- Proficiency with CAD and PLM tools, such as NX and Teamcenter, or equivalent systems.
- Experience developing validation plans, reliability testing, and failure analysis workflows.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Experience scaling hardware systems from prototype through EVT/DVT/PVT and into production.
- Strong intuition for designing high-performance electromechanical systems and understanding the tradeoffs between performance, robustness, manufacturability, and cost.
- Highly hands-on with building, debugging, instrumenting, and testing hardware.
- Ability to move fluidly between first-principles analysis, rapid prototyping, and production-oriented engineering decisions.
- Comfortable working in fast-moving environments with evolving requirements and aggressive technical goals.
- Strong sense of ownership and proactively drive cross-functional alignment.
- Clear communication across disciplines and effective collaboration with research, controls, manufacturing, and operations teams.
- Motivated by enabling the next generation of intelligent robotic systems through differentiated hardware capabilities.

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