Systems Engineer

Build a career powered by innovations that matter! At Novanta, our innovations power technology products that are transforming healthcare and advanced manufacturing—improving productivity, enhancing people’s lives and redefining what’s possible. We create for our global customers engineered components and sub-systems that deliver extreme precision and performance for a range of mission-critical applications—from minimally invasive surgery to robotics to 3D metal printing.

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Business Unit Overview Novanta Robotics and Automation (R&A) delivers advanced motion control solutions that enable precision, efficiency, and reliability in demanding industrial and medical applications. With decades of expertise in motion and control, Novanta R&A partners closely with customers to solve complex system‑level challenges and bring differentiated products to market.

R&A offers a broad portfolio of motion control products, including servo drives, inductive and optical encoders, stepper motors, and force torque sensors. The products are designed to perform in demanding, high-reliability environments. By combining deep motion expertise with intelligent electronics and robust mechanical design, R&A products help customers optimize performance, simplify integration, and reduce total system cost.

As part of Novanta, R&A leverages global engineering, manufacturing, and support capabilities while maintaining a responsive, customer‑centric approach—helping OEMs accelerate innovation and deliver reliable, high‑value motion systems.

Job Summary As a Systems Engineer within Novanta R&A, you will help define safe, reliable, and high-performance motion control products for demanding industrial and medical applications. With a focus on functional safety, you will translate customer needs into system requirements, architectures, and verification strategies across hardware, firmware, software, and mechanical disciplines.

Functional safety is treated as a specialization within the broader systems engineering role. You will contribute to safety requirements, concepts, architectures, diagnostics, and SIL/PL-related calculations, ensuring they are integrated from concept and risk analysis through validation, documentation, and certification readiness.

You will join a fast moving and experienced engineering team using modern tools, advanced practices, and state-of-the-art power electronics to develop products where system architecture, safety, precision, and reliability are critical.

Primary Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain system requirements, system architecture, and functional decompositions.

• Maintain requirements traceability across the product lifecycle, from concept through verification and validation.

• Collaborate with hardware, firmware, software, mechanical, quality, and product teams to align requirements, architecture, implementation, and verification activities.

• Challenge assumptions, evaluate trade-offs, and propose robust technical solutions considering benefits, risks, limitations, and system-level impacts.

• Define and maintain functional safety requirements, safety concepts, technical safety concepts, product safety concepts, and safety-related architectures.

• Develop diagnostic concepts and support safety analyses such as FMEA, FMEDA, FTA, DFA, and other structured risk assessment methods.

• Perform failure-rate, reliability, and system-level safety calculations, including PFH, MTTFd, DC, SFF, and related SIL or PL metrics.

• Ensure alignment with applicable functional safety standards and directives, mainly IEC 61508 and ISO 13849, and other product safety, machinery safety, and regulatory requirements.

• Support third-party functional safety assessments, certification activities.

• Develop and maintain safety case documentation, safety manuals, application notes, and customer-facing technical guidance for safe product integration.

• Define engineering procedures and techniques to control systematic failures, including functional safety software development practices such as coding standards, static analysis, and software testing.

• Contribute to the continuous improvement of engineering processes, workflows, tools, and functional safety practices.

Required Experience, Skills and Education

• MSc or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

• TÜV Functional Safety Engineer certification, or equivalent, is preferred.

• 2+ years of relevant professional experience in systems engineering, embedded systems, functional safety, or related product development.

• Experience with Requirements Management tools.

• Proven functional safety experience at application or end-product level, ideally in robotics or automation. Knowledge of IEC 61508 and ISO 13849.

• Experience in risk and failure analysis methods, including FMEA, FMEDA, FTA, and DFA.

• Experience with system-level safety calculations, including PFH, MTTFd, DC, and SFF.

• Background in electronic design, including familiarity with embedded hardware and software design.

• Full professional proficiency in English.

Novanta is proud to be an equal employment opportunity and affirmative action workplace. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, military and veteran status, disability, genetics, or any other category protected by federal law or Novanta policy.

Please call +1 781-266-5700 if you need a disability accommodation for any part of the employment process.