Electrical Development Engineer

Electrical Design Engineer

Are you an electrical engineer who enjoys designing, building, and troubleshooting hardware? Do you enjoy taking electronic designs from schematic and PCB layout through fabrication, bring-up, integration, and test? Are you interested in developing hardware systems that integrate electronics, sensors, optical hardware, and embedded processing? If so, we're looking for someone like you to join our team at APL.

Our team develops advanced optical systems used to evaluate and demonstrate complex sensing and control technologies. These systems combine custom electronics, optical components, real-time processing, instrumentation, and software to create high-fidelity test environments and advanced prototypes.

We are seeking an experienced electrical engineer to contribute to the design, implementation, integration, and testing of the electronic hardware that enables these capabilities. You will work closely with electrical, optical, mechanical, FPGA, software, and systems engineers to develop laboratory and fieldable systems that require precise timing, reliable interfaces, and high-performance real-time operation.

This position is well suited for an engineer who enjoys working across the full hardware development lifecycle and is equally comfortable designing a printed circuit board, bringing up new hardware at the bench, and troubleshooting an integrated system with an oscilloscope.

As an Electrical Design Engineer...

• Design analog, digital, and mixed-signal electronic circuits for real-time hardware-in-the-loop and optical test systems.
• Develop printed circuit boards from concept through schematic capture, PCB layout, fabrication, assembly, bring-up, and integration.
• Perform PCB design using tools such as Altium Designer and KiCad.
• Design electronics for sensor interfaces, signal conditioning, power distribution, communications, timing, synchronization, and control.
• Select components and develop hardware interfaces between optical systems, sensors, computers, FPGA-based hardware, embedded processors, and laboratory equipment.
• Perform hands-on electronics testing, debugging, and troubleshooting using equipment such as oscilloscopes, digital multimeters, power supplies, function generators, logic analyzers, and other laboratory instrumentation.
• Develop test approaches and execute board-level and system-level verification and characterization.
• Integrate custom electronics into complex real-time hardware-in-the-loop optical systems.
• Diagnose hardware and system-level issues involving signal integrity, timing, power, communications, and hardware/software interfaces.
• Support system integration, experimental testing, and demonstrations in laboratory environments.
• Develop documentation including schematics, interface definitions, test procedures, test results, and design review materials.
• Participate in peer reviews and collaborate with multidisciplinary engineering teams throughout the design and integration process.
• Work with FPGA and software engineers to define and implement real-time hardware interfaces and system architectures.

You meet our qualifications for the job if you...

• A Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a closely related technical field.
• 5+ years of relevant experience designing, developing, integrating, or testing electronic hardware.
• Experience designing analog, digital, and/or mixed-signal electronics.
• Hands-on experience with schematic capture and printed circuit board development.
• Experience with PCB design tools such as Altium Designer, KiCad, or equivalent.
• Strong laboratory skills and experience troubleshooting electronics using oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, function generators, logic analyzers, and similar test equipment.
• Experience bringing up and debugging newly fabricated printed circuit boards.
• A working understanding of common digital and analog interfaces, signal conditioning, power electronics, and electronic component selection.
• Experience integrating electronic hardware into larger systems and troubleshooting interactions between multiple hardware and software components.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills…