EE Design & Test Engineer

San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States Hardware

The Motion Sensing Hardware team at Apple develops sophisticated test systems and instrumentation that support cutting-edge sensing technologies in consumer products. This role offers an opportunity to join a team that designs, builds, and validates the custom hardware infrastructure used to characterize inertial, pressure, and magnetic sensors throughout the product development lifecycle. We invite motivated and innovative electrical engineers to help create the test instrumentation that gives our team unmatched insight into sensor performance.

As a Module Test Instrumentation & Automation Engineer, you will be responsible for designing the electronic hardware and supporting software that underpin the team’s sensor characterization capability. Your work will span schematic design, PCB layout oversight, and the software layers that connect custom test hardware to the team’s broader automation infrastructure. You will bring together deep electrical engineering fundamentals and strong software development skills to deliver instrumentation that is precise, reliable, and tightly integrated with the team’s characterization workflows.

This position requires a versatile electrical engineer with hands‑on experience designing analog and mixed-signal circuits, overseeing PCB layout for precision measurement applications, and writing software to connect custom test hardware to the team’s automation and data collection pipelines. You will own the design of sensor evaluation boards and test fixtures from schematic through bring‑up, ensuring that hardware choices — signal conditioning topology, power architecture, interface selection — directly serve the accuracy and throughput demands of sensor characterization.

You will develop the software interfaces that expose test hardware functionality to higher‑level automation tools, and work closely with firmware and embedded software engineers where dedicated firmware is required. The role demands rigorous attention to signal integrity and measurement accuracy, strong software engineering skills, and the ability to collaborate closely with characterization and data automation engineers to ensure that the hardware and software layers work together seamlessly.

• Design analog and mixed‑signal schematics for sensor evaluation boards, test fixtures, and custom data acquisition hardware used in IMU, pressure, and compass characterization
• Oversee PCB layout for test hardware, reviewing for signal integrity, noise isolation, power supply rejection and measurement accuracy
• Develop software interfaces and APIs that expose test hardware functionality to higher‑level automation and data collection tools
• Write Python‑based tools and scripts to automate hardware bring‑up, functional verification and calibration of custom test instrumentation
• Perform board‑level debug using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, spectrum analyzers and precision measurement equipment to validate hardware behavior
• Collaborate with characterization engineers to translate sensor test requirements into hardware specifications
• Collaborate with firmware engineers to define embedded interface requirements for custom test hardware
• Collaborate with data automation engineers to ensure test hardware integrates cleanly into shared data collection and analysis pipelines
• Manage schematic revision control, maintaining clear documentation of hardware versions throughout the product development cycle
• Support bring‑up of new sensor variants on evaluation hardware, identifying and resolving signal chain issues at the hardware‑software boundary

• BS and a minimum of 10 years relevant industry experience
• 5+ years of hands‑on experience designing schematics and reviewing PCB layouts for analog, mixed‑signal or precision measurement applications
• Proficiency with industry‑standard schematic capture tools (Altium Designer, Cadence, or equivalent)
• Strong analog design fundamentals: signal conditioning, filtering, amplifier selection, noise analysis, and power supply design for precision measurement
• Familiarity with common sensor…