Powertrain Reverse Engineer

Were ALTEN Technology USA an engineering company helping clients bring groundbreaking ideas to lifefrom advancing space exploration and life-saving medical devices to building autonomous electric vehicles. With 3000 experts across North America we partner with leading companies in aerospace medical devices robotics automotive commercial vehicles EVs rail and more.

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Powertrain Reverse Engineer

Project Summary

We operate an autonomous-driving fleet built on the Toyota Highlander hybrid platform. The added compute load draws significantly more power than the stock hybrid system was designed to supply causing the high-voltage battery to deplete and trigger faults that take vehicles out of service. The vehicle CAN bus has already been decoded for driving functions but the hybrid control system charging logic battery state of charge and thermal management remains undecoded. We are looking for someone to reverse-engineer these hybrid/powertrain signals and deliver an updated DBC file so we can monitor and ultimately resolve the battery-depletion issue.

Key Responsibilities & Deliverables

• Capture and analyze CAN traffic on-vehicle (with driver/technician support)
• Reverse-engineer undecoded hybrid battery charging thermal and powertrain diagnostic signals
• Produce a validated updatedDBC fileand submit it as a pull request to our repo
• Re-run captured data against the new DBC to validate signal accuracy
• Document decoded signals and methodology

Must-Have Skills

• Hands-onautomotive CAN bus reverse engineeringexperience
• DBC fileauthoring/editing
• Proficiency withVector CANalyzer/CANoe(or equivalent) for trace capture and analysis
• Working knowledge ofhybrid/EV powertrain and battery management systems (BMS)
• Comfortable reading raw CAN traces and isolating/decoding unknown signals
• Version control / Git pull-request workflow

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Direct experience withToyota hybrid systems (THS)and Toyota diagnostics (Techstream/TIS)
• Python (or similar) for CAN data analysis
• Familiarity with AI-assisted coding tools (e.g. Cursor/Claude) we use these to accelerate decoding
• Prior work decoding OEM black box control modules

Tools & Resources Provided

TIS laptop CANalyzer Cursor Claude GitHub access scheduled vehicle time plus VO driver technician (TIS access) and supporting/firmware engineers.

Salary Range: $120000-$135000/K

The actual salary offered is dependent on various factors including but not limited to location the candidates combination of job-related knowledge qualifications skills education training and experience

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin disability protected veteran status age genetic information or pregnancy.

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Compliance Notice: Alten USA is a federal contractor subject to the requirements of the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA) and Executive Order 11246. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and consider all qualified applicants without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin disability or veteran status.

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