Senior Hardware Architect – Portfolio Coherence

3db-Labs; West Chester Township (OH); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

3dB Labs is seeking a Hardware Technical Lead to act as the senior portfolio-level technical authority for hardware architecture, standards, lifecycle, and manufacturability across its products. The role ensures a coherent hardware foundation while accommodating product-specific needs.

You will partner with Product and Software Technical Leads, Engineering, Production, and QA to maintain portfolio coherence and guide cross-product decisions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.
• Experience leading hardware or systems engineering for complex integrated products.
• Experience across electrical, mechanical, compute, RF, power, thermal, networking; DFM & DFT considerations.
• Proven ability to lead trade studies and design reviews; mentor senior engineers.
• Experience with ruggedized systems, defense or mission systems; low-volume/high-complexity manufacturing desirable.
• US citizenship is required; ability to obtain Top Secret clearance.

Responsibilities

• Establish common hardware architecture principles and standards for compute, electrical and mechanical design, power, thermal, RF, networking, connectors, and other interfaces.
• Identify opportunities to standardize components, platforms, and interfaces for reliability, cost, supply resilience, production efficiency, or sustainment.
• Review major hardware and platform decisions and document portfolio standards and decisions.
• Partner with Product Technical Leads early in requirements and design to ensure hardware approaches are portfolio-aware.
• Lead design reviews and trade studies for significant new hardware, redesigns, and technology refreshes, balancing performance, SWaP, reliability, cost, lead time, manufacturability, and integration risk.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for cross-product hardware issues and coordinate with the Software Technical Lead on drivers, compute constraints, interfaces, and hardware/software integration.
• Maintain visibility into lifecycle risks, vendor end-of-life events, lead times, and supply constraints across the portfolio.
• Plan technology refreshes and transitions before lifecycle risks become delivery or customer disruptions.
• Support platform and component selection, make/buy and vendor evaluations, backward-compatibility decisions, and transitions between hardware baselines.
• Partner with Production and Quality to ensure hardware can be built, tested, inspected, serviced, and sustained repeatably, with DFx practices.
• Ensure hardware transitions to Production with stable designs and the required build, assembly, test, configuration, and technical data.
• Use production and field failures, root-cause analysis, and lessons learned to improve common hardware standards and prevent recurring issues across products.

Skills

Lead hardware architecture

Design governance

Trade studies

Mentor engineers

RF/Power/Thermal knowledge

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering

Job description

3dB Labs is seeking a Hardware Technical Lead to act as the senior portfolio-level technical authority for hardware architecture, standards, lifecycle, and manufacturability across its products. The role ensures a coherent hardware foundation while accommodating product-specific needs.

You will partner with Product and Software Technical Leads, Engineering, Production, and QA to maintain portfolio coherence and guide cross-product decisions.