Sr Hardware Development Electrical Engineer

• Own electrical boards end to end: requirements and system trades, architecture, component selection, schematic capture, PCB layout, bring-up, debug, documentation, production release, and test.
• Do your own layout. You’ll be placing parts and routing boards, not handing a schematic to someone else. Stackup, impedance control, power planes, thermal reliefs, creepage and clearance, and DFM for our own floor are your call.
• Design mixed-signal boards that have to work the first time in salt air, heat, and vibration, and keep working for months without anyone watching: controllers, gate drive, sensing and instrumentation, power supplies, interface and communications boards.
• Build the bench and the test fixtures for your boards, bring them up yourself, and write down what you learned so the next rev is better.
• Be on the floor when your boards get built and in the field when they get deployed. If one fails, you go find out why.
• Work closely with mechanical, thermal, firmware, test, and supply chain so the board fits the enclosure, sheds its heat, gets built repeatably, and uses parts we can actually buy.
• Push back on requirements that don’t hold up, and change your mind when the data says to.

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, or physics.
• 5+ years designing circuits, electronic products, or hardware in industry.
• You’ve taken new boards from a blank schematic through production, not incremental revisions of something that already existed, and you can show us the layouts.
• Fluent in at least one ECAD tool (we use KiCad; Altium or similar is fine) and able to manage a shared library and release process.

Nice To Have

• Master’s degree in electrical engineering or a related discipline.
• Mixed-signal layout experience: processors or FPGAs, Ethernet, high-speed serial, DDR, I2C/SPI, op-amps, ADCs/DACs, and power supply design on the same board.
• Power electronics layout: switching converters, gate drive, current sensing, magnetics placement, and managing loop area and parasitics at kilowatt scale.
• EMI/EMC-aware design and experience taking boards through environmental or compliance testing.
• Experience debugging and testing electronics on a bench and in the field, and the instinct to build the test setup before the problem shows up.
• Comfortable in Python and C/C++ for test automation, data analysis, and firmware collaboration.
• Experience on defense, aerospace, maritime, or other hardware that has to survive its environment., To conform to U.S. Government export regulations (ITAR/EAR), applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3). Candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance; active clearance not required.

$140,000-$220,000 base + equity + benefits.

First Order Effects (FOE) is building America’s Infrastructure Prime for the robotic era. Autonomous ships, drones, and robots are rewriting how the world moves, fights, and builds - but none of them work without infrastructure to power them, connect them, and launch and recover them.