Electronics Design Engineer
Location: Northern Virginia (Washington DC metro), on-site
Type: Permanent, full time
Base salary $150,000 – $175,000 plus equity (stock options) and full benefits
Eligibility: Must be a US Person
The Company
A venture-backed space company building the first fully commercial satellite navigation service, a complete alternative to legacy GPS designed from a clean sheet.
Positioning underpins almost everything in modern life, yet the incumbent system is slow to fix, unencrypted, and trivially jammed or spoofed. That is not good enough for the applications coming next: autonomous vehicles, drone logistics, urban air mobility, augmented reality, and safety-critical government timing. This business exists to fix it, delivering higher accuracy, dramatically faster time to first fix, and genuine anti-jam and anti-spoof protection.
The architecture spans a constellation of small satellites, a global ground station network, and next generation receiver technology. The GNSS hardware, software and services market sits at roughly $260 billion a year, and the company intends to take a serious share of it.
The Role
This is the primary board seat on the payload. You will own the hardware at the centre of the flight system, from architecture and schematic through to first power-on, and you will stay with it through integration, production and the next generation design.
The company is upfront that this is more than a board design job. They are looking for someone who wants to become the technical anchor of the payload hardware team as it scales, starting with oversight of one junior engineer and growing from there.
What you will be doing
- Owning board-level design and bring-up of the payload primary board, covering architecture, schematic capture, component selection and first power-on debug
- Directing the layout, assembly and test work carried out by external layout partners, assembly technicians and the payload test team
- Holding responsibility for how the multi-board payload behaves as an integrated system, working hand in hand with the RF lead on the amplifier board
- Designing the payload precision timing and frequency reference chain, including the low-noise board partitioning needed to hit timing stability requirements
- Sustaining and revising the current payload hardware while defining the architecture for the next generation
- Producing designs that are genuinely manufacturable and testable at production cadence, not just first articles that work on the bench
- Supporting anomaly investigation and driving design iteration off the back of it
What you will need
- BS in Electrical Engineering or a closely related discipline (MS preferred)
- 10+ years designing complex mixed-signal and RF-adjacent boards for space, aerospace or other high reliability applications, covering clock and timing distribution, low-noise power, high-speed digital and analogue or RF interfaces, with real rigour on signal and power integrity
- Proven end to end ownership of primary or otherwise complex PCBs, from schematic and detailed design through fabrication, bring-up and functional test. You should be comfortable walking through prior designs and explaining the decisions behind them in a hands-on interview exercise
- Experience owning the integrated performance of a multi-board electronic system, not only individual boards
- An electrical engineer first, with enough understanding of the FPGA, firmware and software running on your boards to work effectively across that boundary
- Design for manufacture and design for test experience at production volume
- Ready to step into technical leadership of the payload hardware team, including mentoring a junior engineer in the near term
- Strong written and verbal communication
- Self-directed and comfortable in a fast-paced startup with limited process
- US Person status
Nice to have
- GNSS, precision timing, or oscillator and clock distribution hardware experience
- Familiarity with SoC and FPGA based payloads (Zynq or similar) and the board-level support they need
- Enough hands-on PCB layout experience to set constraints, critically review routing, and get the best out of external layout, fab and assembly partners
- Previous mentoring or hardware team leadership
- Experience running multiple hardware generations in parallel while holding design and configuration discipline
The kind of person who does well here
Someone who genuinely enjoys the startup setting rather than tolerating it. Positive, straightforward communicator with a sense of humour. Thinks strategically but executes tactically. Comfortable working across every function in the business, not just engineering. Happy to roll sleeves up and get stuck into whatever the week demands.
Equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, creed, colour, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, disability, sex, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by law.