Location: San Francisco, United States (Office)
On-Site | Full-time
Compensation: $150K - $200K
We are hiring on behalf of our client. An elite, stealth-stage hardware company based in San Francisco who is seeking a Founding Electrical Engineer to help design and build a first-of-its-kind autonomous circuit board fabrication platform. The client’s technology is engineered to transform raw ideas into finished, fully tested circuit boards in record time, unlocking rapid iteration for hardware innovators nationwide.
This role is ideal for a hands-on builder who thrives in high-ownership, fast-paced environments. The selected engineer will personally design, bring up, and debug critical electrical systems across custom circuit boards, test and measurement rigs, sensing, motion control, and embedded firmware.
As a founding team member, this engineer will tackle unsolved, cross-disciplinary physical problems with full autonomy, from schematic capture and benchtop debugging to deploying working systems on physical machines operating within micron-level tolerances.
Key Responsibilities:
- Custom Electronics Design: Design, prototype, and bring up custom circuit boards for sensing, actuation, precision measurement, and system control.
- Autonomous Machine Integration: Develop robust electrical architecture for complex, autonomous hardware operating under stringent physical and thermal tolerances.
- Test & Measurement Systems: Build high-accuracy test fixtures, harnesses, instrumentation, and agentic harnesses to rigorously validate hardware performance.
- Root-Cause Debugging: Diagnose and resolve complex failures spanning electronics, firmware, software, and mechanical interactions using benchtop instrumentation.
- Firmware & Control Development: Write low-level software/firmware necessary to drive, test, and debug custom electrical and mechatronic subsystems.
- End-to-End Ownership: Take full technical ownership of subsystems—from early-stage architecture and schematic design to physical integration and fielded validation.
- Deep Electrical Engineering Expertise: Mastery of circuit design, signal integrity, power rails, noise reduction, and failure modes. Proven track record of personally designing, bringing up, and debugging circuit boards to verified metrics.
- Hardware Shipping Track Record: Background delivering hardware at a company that ships real, fielded products (e.g., robotics, aerospace, defense, automotive, industrial automation, semiconductor equipment, or advanced manufacturing).
- Benchtop Test & Diagnostic Skills: Extensive experience using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, DAQs, signal generators, power supplies, and custom test fixtures to isolate issues at the bench.
- Systems & Mechanical Intuition: Solid understanding of how electronics behave in physical machines, including thermal dynamics, motor controls, vibration, sensors, grounding, and packaging.
- Strong Coding Fundamentals: Proficiency in writing firmware or code to control and debug hardware independently, built on strong fundamental programming concepts.
- Educational & Practical Background: Bachelor’s or advanced degree in EE, CS, ME, Physics, or equivalent high-impact, hands-on engineering experience.
- Work Style & Location: 100% on-site in San Francisco, CA. Comfort with an intense, high-commitment founding environment (typically 6 days/week) built around extreme ownership and rapid iteration.