PCB Designer

GCS Recruitment; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

GCS Recruitment seeks a Hardware Design Engineer or PCB Engineer to join a team engineering advanced phased-array antenna electronics for satellite communications. You will own board development, bring-up, and laboratory validation on large, high-density multilayer PCBs.

Requirements include 8+ years of board-level electrical design, hands-on lab skills with oscilloscopes and protocol analyzers, and experience with high-speed interfaces (PCIe, Ethernet, DDR) plus signal and power integrity.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of board-level electrical design experience.
• Experience with complex multilayer PCB design and power distribution.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Lead bring-up of newly fabricated boards, including power-on testing, subsystem checkout, debugging, and root-cause analysis.
• Plan and execute design verification and validation activities, including high-speed digital testing, power characterization, and functional verification, documenting results to engineering standards.
• Collaborate with design engineers to identify issues and implement improvements in future board revisions.
• Contribute to schematic capture and PCB layout activities for next-generation hardware designs.
• Support downstream integration and testing teams by delivering validated hardware and assisting with measurement and debug activities.

Skills

Board-level electrical design

Schematic capture

Multilayer PCB design

Power distribution

Sequencing

High-speed interfaces

Signal integrity

Power integrity

Lab debugging

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Electrical Engineering

Tools

Oscilloscopes

Logic analyzers

Protocol analyzers

High-speed test equipment

Job description

Hardware Design Engineer or PCB Engineer

The Role

The team designs advanced phased-array antenna electronics for satellite communication systems, utilizing large, high-density multilayer PCBs with thousands of components, custom silicon devices, and high-speed digital interfaces operating at multi-gigabit data rates. Boards are being fabricated at a pace that exceeds the design team's validation capacity, creating an opportunity for experienced hardware engineers to own board development and laboratory validation activities.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead bring-up of newly fabricated boards, including power-on testing, subsystem checkout, debugging, and root-cause analysis.
• Plan and execute design verification and validation activities, including high-speed digital testing, power characterization, and functional verification, while documenting results to engineering standards.
• Collaborate closely with design engineers to identify issues and implement improvements in future board revisions.
• Contribute to schematic capture and PCB layout activities for next-generation hardware designs.
• Support downstream integration and testing teams by delivering validated hardware and assisting with measurement and debug activities.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of board-level electrical design experience, including schematic capture, complex multilayer PCB design, power distribution, and sequencing.
• Strong hands-on laboratory skills with expertise in board bring-up, debugging, validation, and use of oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, and high-speed test equipment.
• Experience with high-speed digital interfaces and multi-gigabit serial communications (e.g., PCIe, Ethernet, DDR, JESD204) along with signal integrity and power integrity considerations.
• Full product lifecycle experience from design and manufacturing through bring-up, validation, and production support.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, or equivalent industry experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience in satellite, aerospace, or other high-reliability electronic systems.
• Exposure to phased-array, RF, or radar hardware.
• Experience working with custom ASICs, SoCs, FPGAs, and embedded hardware platforms.
• Familiarity with Python-based test automation and laboratory scripting.