Hardware Engineer

Description: Designs, develops, and tests computer hardware, including computer systems, circuit boards, computer chips, keyboards, routers, and printers. Supervises the manufacturing, production, and installation of the parts. Designs and oversees the production of computer hardware equipment. Tests and re-tests parts to ensure they work properly. Identifies and isolates defects. Designs and develops the software systems that control computers. Designs and tests circuits and other electronic components. Tests work and refine processes. Integrates components into the final design. Evaluates the effectiveness of the design and change if necessary. Generates specifications for parts. Controls the efficiency of processes. Builds, tests and modifies product prototypes. Analyzes information and recommend appropriate hardware to users. Designs support peripherals, including central processing units (CPUs), support logic, microprocessors, custom integrated circuits, and printers and disk drives. Specifies power supply requirements and configuration. Retrieves data for analysis of system capabilities. Experience with Hardware engineering software (Altium Designer, Orcad, Cadence Allegro) and Electronics tools (soldering irons, magnifiers).

Background/Need:

The Tactical Edge Communications Group, is seeking a Baseband Hardware Design Engineer.

This engineer will support the development and testing of baseband hardware and PCBAs for Tactical Edge Communications. The hardware in question is highly SWaP-C constrained and spans RF to digitization. The first 3-6 months of the role will be primarily in the lab testing and debugging existing hardware, and then the role transitions into more design work for follow-up hardware in different form factors and configurations, so a strong background in design and test are both relevant.

Responsibilities:

- Test and debug of miniature hardware spanning RF front-end, transceivers, SoCs, baseband processors
- Design of communication hardware targeting miniature form-factors
- Writing and support of design validation and test plans
- Collaboration with RF engineers, software engineers, mechanical engineers, and waveform analysts
Required Skills:

- Experience with the part selection, schematic capture, layout, and test of complex mixed-signal boards targeting SoCs or FPGAs with all relevant clocking, power, and high-rate interfaces
- Experience working in desktop and embedded Linux
- Experience with one or more scripting/embedded programming languages such as Python, C/C++, or Bash
- Experience with typical lab equipment including high-speed oscilloscopes, bench power supplies, spectrum analyzers, and signal generators
- Bachelor s Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or similar
- Experience working on cross-disciplinary teams with Mechanical and RF engineers
Nice-to-have:

- Experience designing cost- and size-sensitive baseband hardware for commercial, cellular, or military applications
- Experience with high-reliability design for aerospace and military applications
- Experience with designing for medium-rate production up to 1000s / year
- Understanding of RF communication systems and digital signal processing, and ability to translate these to hardware requirements for sampling data converters, data processing, and RF performance
- Experience with NXP i.MX processors and similar
- Experience with NXP baseband processors
- Experience with Xilinx/AMD FPGAs, MPSoCs, and ACAPs
- Experience with ADI transceivers
- Experience with Mentor Graphics Xpedition
- Experience with Altium
- Experience with SERDES including PCIe Gen 2+
- Experience with DDR such as LPDDR5
Others:

• Clearance: Interim clearance is sufficient to start.
• Work Location: Due to the nature of the work, this position is 100% onsite.

Interview Process: : initial phone screen and then a second round with a wider group audience. The second-round interview is preferred to be onsite for local candidates. If there is a candidate that is relocating, they will entertain a zoom interview.