Principal Electrical Engineer

Aerospace is at a turning point — costs are rising, supply chains are strained, and old ways of building can’t keep up. At Neon Aero, we’re breaking that mold. We move fast, think big, and combine start-up agility with aerospace expertise to design, build, and scale aircraft in ways the industry has never seen. Our team leverages automation, AI-driven tools, and a fully connected digital backbone to accelerate innovation and reduce barriers to production.

Here, you won’t just take a job — you’ll help reinvent how the world flies. If you’re ready to solve complex problems, push technology further, and work alongside some of the brightest minds in aerospace, this is your chance to make a real impact.

We are seeking a Principal Electrical Engineer to provide technical leadership in the architecture, design, and qualification of high-integrity electronic control systems across Neon's product portfolio.

This role is focused on the controller and system-electronics side of the architecture: command/monitor architecture, flight control computers and LRUs, embedded compute, sensing, communications, fault detection, redundancy, and the electrical interfaces that tie complex products together. It is complementary to our Principal Engineer – High Voltage Power Electronics role, which owns high-voltage motor-drive and power-stage design.

This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role. You will develop system architectures, block diagrams, schematics, interface definitions, safety concepts, and the analysis behind them. You will work directly with embedded software, motor control, systems, mechanical, power electronics, test, manufacturing, and certification teams to bring high-reliability electronic systems from concept through qualification and production.

This role does not require direct people management, but it requires principal-level technical leadership, mentoring, and ownership of difficult cross-functional decisions.

• Own electrical system architecture for high-integrity controller electronics, FCCs, LRUs, actuator controllers, avionics/compute platforms, sensing systems, and related embedded hardware.
• Architect command/monitor, active-active, simplex, duplex, or other redundant control architectures based on system safety, integrity, availability, and cost requirements.
• Define partitioning between command processors, monitoring processors, motor-control electronics, power electronics, sensors, communications, and vehicle-level interfaces.
• Translate system requirements and safety objectives into practical electronic architectures, hardware requirements, interface definitions, and verification strategies.
• Select microcontrollers, processors, FPGAs, memories, communication devices, supervisors, watchdogs, isolation components, and sensor interfaces appropriate for high-reliability applications.
• Design and review embedded digital, analog, and mixed-signal electronics, including low-voltage power supplies, power sequencing, reset architecture, discrete I/O, signal conditioning, protection, and health monitoring.
• Architect fault detection, fault containment, redundancy management, cross-monitoring, heartbeat, synchronization, and safe-state mechanisms.
• Define communication architecture and physical layers for interfaces such as CAN / CAN FD, ARINC 825, ARINC 429, Ethernet, RS-422/485, SPI, and similar embedded or aerospace buses.
• Own electrical interface definitions and collaborate with systems and software teams on ICDs, timing assumptions, diagnostic coverage, degraded modes, and hardware/software partitioning.
• Establish grounding, shielding, isolation, EMI/EMC, signal-integrity, and power-integrity approaches across boards, harnesses, sensors, and enclosures.
• Lead schematic…