Senior Electronic Engineer

Are you a hardware engineer who has taken processor and SoC boards from architecture to production, and want your next design to actually fly?

I'm recruiting on behalf of a fast-growing defence technology company building electric propulsion systems for unmanned aircraft. They design and manufacture in-house in Europe, from motors and power electronics to firmware, and even own their PCB fabrication. As customers move away from Chinese-sourced electronics, they are building a trusted, vertically integrated alternative. They are moving from prototype to volume production, and this is a chance to join a small team early.

You will own the digital side of the hardware, reporting to the Head of Electronic Hardware. It is a hands-on design role with no direct reports.

First up is a home-grown flight controller to replace the Chinese reference designs the industry relies on. After that, the products get harder:

• Companion compute running visual-inertial odometry at frame rate on a few watts
• Imaging payloads with LWIR cores, optics and video paths
• Navigation that survives GNSS jamming and spoofing, including terrain-relative and star tracking
• Radio links that adapt modulation and hopping in the field

• Design processor and SoC boards end to end: device selection, power architecture, boot, debug access
• Route DDR and high-speed serial interfaces to meet timing, with full stackup and impedance control
• Own signal and power integrity
• Integrate IMUs, magnetometers, barometers and GNSS receivers, and design the front ends around them
• Design radio and antenna interfaces
• Design for EMC alongside a demanding motor inverter noise source
• Bring boards up on the bench and define the hardware/firmware interface
• Work with power electronics and mechanical teams, and carry designs through to manufacture and test

• 8 to 10 years of hands-on electronics design, with boards that reached production or a qualified prototype
• Practical SI/PI: stackup, controlled impedance, decoupling, return paths
• Mixed-signal and sensor integration in electrically noisy environments
• RF/connectivity: radio modules, transceivers, antenna matching
• PCB layout in Altium Designer (or equivalent) on dense multi-layer boards
• Bench bring-up with debug probes, scopes, and logic/protocol analysers
• Experience defining hardware interfaces with firmware engineers

• Development boards or reference designs for a semiconductor company (a strong fit)
• Flight control, avionics, robotics or other safety-relevant embedded platforms
• Aerospace/defence electronics, DEF STAN 59-411 or MIL-STD-461 experience
• GNSS integration, CAN/DroneCAN, Ethernet/USB at hardware level
• Embedded vision, SoM integration, or edge inference hardware
• Formal high-speed simulation experience
• Degree in Electronic or Electrical Engineering

This is an on-site role in South East England.

#Electronics Engineering #Hardware Engineering #PCBDesign #Altium #Embedded Systems #Defence #Drones #UAV #Avionics #FPGA #High Speed Design  #Signal Integrity #Hiring