Senior Actuator Modeling Engineer

About the Company

Rhoda AI is 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. We've raised over $450M and are investing aggressively in model research, infrastructure, hardware development, and manufacturing scale-up.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain 1D actuator models for performance prediction and correlation with bench/robot data
• Synthesize customer use cases into representative duty cycles for sizing and life prediction
• Build optimization and sensitivity models to identify high-leverage design changes
• Assign data-driven monetary values to actuator attributes to facilitate rigorous trade-off decisions
• Develop thermal models to drive motor cooling decisions and correlate against test data
• Create fatigue and life models for gear and bearing sizing grounded in duty cycles
• Build efficiency models capturing electromagnetic, mechanical, and thermal losses
• Partner with actuator design, controls, reliability, and systems engineering teams

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, or Applied Physics
• 5+ years of experience developing physics-based models for electromechanical systems (actuators, motors, or robotics)
• Proven track record of modeling work materially shaping hardware design
• Strong grasp of electromagnetics, gear mechanics, bearing life, heat transfer, and rotor dynamics
• Deep proficiency in 1D system modeling and multi-domain simulation
• Proficiency in MATLAB/Simulink, Python (NumPy, SciPy, pandas), or equivalent
• Experience with duty cycle synthesis, design of experiments, and formal optimization methods

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree in a related engineering field
• Experience with reliability engineering, Weibull analysis, or B-life specification
• Hands-on experience with PMSM/BLDC motor design or planetary/harmonic gear sizing
• Background in thermal-fluid modeling or lumped-parameter thermal networks
• Experience building data pipelines that ingest field or test data to update model parameters
• Prior experience in robotics or automotive sectors (legged robots, manipulators, or EVs)