Systems Engineer

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.

• 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.

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.

Novanta is one global team with over 26 offices located in The Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Looking for a great place to work? You have found it with a culture that embraces teamwork, collaboration and empowerment. Come explore Novanta.

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.