# Senior Actuator Engineer (Hands Team) at Rhoda AI

Senior Actuator Engineer (Hands Team) at Rhoda AI in Mountain View. Full-time, paying $175k–$280k. Posted July 28, 2026.

- Company: Rhoda AI
- Location: Mountain View
- Job type: Full-time
- Pay: $175k–$280k
- Posted: 2026-07-28
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rhoda-ai/833ccf58-5e58-4d00-8db9-09d7bc6ea96a/application
- Source: https://jobmagic.ai/jobs/senior-actuator-engineer-hands-team-rhoda-ai-ack8sf

## Requirements

- Track record of designing and shipping gearboxes, especially planetary gearboxes
- Experience miniaturizing geartrains for tightly packaged, weight- and volume-constrained applications
- Strong command of motor sizing and selection, including power draw, torque density, and efficiency analysis

## Description

At Rhoda AI, we’re building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. We own the full robotics stack from high-performance hardware and robot systems to the infrastructure and state-of-the-art foundation world models that control our robots. Our robots are designed to be generalists capable of operating in complex, real-world environments and handling long-tail edge cases, made possible by our cutting edge research and end-to-end system design. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up to make generalist robotics a reality.
You will design the actuation at the heart of the hand: compact, efficient motor-and-gearbox units that must deliver human-hand dexterity in a human-hand package. Your actuators define what the entire system can do.

### What You'll Do

- Design compact motor-gearbox actuator units for the hand's fingers and wrist, from concept through production

- Architect miniaturized geartrains — especially planetary — that hit torque, backlash, and packaging targets at finger scale

- Size and select motors against torque, speed, power-draw, thermal, and efficiency requirements

- Build and run bench and dyno tests to characterize actuator performance, efficiency, and durability

- Partner with the structures engineer on packaging and thermal paths, and with the electrical engineer on drive and sensing integration

### What You Bring

- Track record of designing and shipping gearboxes, especially planetary gearboxes

- Experience miniaturizing geartrains for tightly packaged, weight- and volume-constrained applications

- Strong command of motor sizing and selection, including power draw, torque density, and efficiency analysis

### Nice to Have

- Gear design experience — tooth profiles, materials, and manufacturing methods

- Experience with tendon- or linkage-driven finger actuation

- Familiarity with backdrivability and transparency requirements for teleoperation