Senior Test & Evaluation Engineer, Sensors

HRL Laboratories Job Opportunity

HRL Laboratories pioneers the next frontiers of physical and information science. Delivering transformative technologies in automotive, aerospace and defense, HRL advances the critical missions of its customers to help them remove limitations and create competitive advantage. HRL then transitions the work back to customers – ready for real-world application. For more than 70 years, HRL's rich portfolio of scientific discoveries and engineering innovations continues to build on each other — often in unexpected, profound and far-reaching ways.

As a private company owned jointly by Boeing and GM, HRL prioritizes purpose over profit, significantly advancing the state of the art.

HRL Laboratories advances critical structural and functional materials and semiconductor devices that enable precision navigation, quantum technologies and extreme-environment performance. With expertise from design through deployment, we deliver scalable, high-performance solutions that transform our customers' missions. Our work leverages digital manufacturing and scalable microfabrication techniques to meet tomorrow's toughest challenges.

HRL's compact, high-performance MEMS IMUs are revolutionizing navigation systems by delivering reliable guidance in GPS-degraded environments. Engineered with navigation-grade precision, these IMUs provide a cost-effective and scalable solution for automotive, aerospace, and other demanding applications where traditional GPS reliance falls short. These innovations aim to deliver a first-of-its-kind navigation-grade product that combines reliability, precision, and affordability. By offering a viable alternative to traditional IMUs, HRL's MEMS technology is advancing the capabilities of autonomous systems and enabling precise navigation in challenging environments.

• Lead end to end IMU evaluation and characterization tasks supporting prototyping, product development, and sustainment, with emphasis on maturing hardware, firmware, and system behavior for transition out of R&D

• Define and execute characterization strategies across environmental, dynamic, and operational conditions, including building and automating hands on test setups (temperature, vibration, shock)

• Analyze performance data to identify key drivers, validate models, and perform root cause investigations of anomalies, drift behaviors, and firmware related effects

• Develop operational firmware to align sensor behavior, filtering, calibration algorithms, and embedded implementation with system level performance goals; support firmware bring up and debug

• Drive sustaining and maturation activities, including hardware/firmware debug, failure analysis, yield trends, and iterative improvement of prototypes and engineering builds

• Develop lab infrastructure and supporting scripts for evaluation, characterization, and validation of products; build automation frameworks in Python / MATLAB / Simulink

• Lead system level validation by defining test plans, developing pass/fail criteria, and ensuring release readiness through robust test coverage and reproducible results

• Partner cross functionally to ensure requirements flow down, system integration readiness, and technical documentation needed for smooth transition to low rate production

• Maintain configuration control, support engineering change processes, and prepare prototypes and early production IMUs for external evaluation and qualification

• Bachelors, master's or Ph.D. in relevant field

• 7+ years hands on experience owning sensor development and digital signal processing, including prototype bring up, hardware/firmware integration, performance validation, and schematic-level hardware design and debug

• 4+ years' experience managing production and test documentation as well as requirements validation and artifact production

• Strong understanding of inertial sensor performance (bias, noise, stability) and their interaction with filtering and compensation algorithms

• Experience with IMU test equipment (vibration systems, shock testers, rate tables, centrifuges, thermal chambers) and test…