Sr Hardware Development Engineer

GCS Recruitment; Newcastle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

GCS Recruitment is seeking a senior EE to lead bring-up and validation of satellite boards in our Seattle-area lab. You will own power-on, section checks, and root-cause debugging for multi-layer boards built around custom ASICs/SoCs.

You will plan verification campaigns, document results, and partner with design and RF/antenna teams on next-gen board designs. A BSEE/MSEE or equivalent and hands-on lab skills are required.

Qualifications

• Experience of EE board-level design: schematic capture, complex dense multilayer PCBs, power delivery and sequencing.
• Hands-on lab strength - board bring-up, debug, and validation; fluency with oscilloscopes and analyzers.
• Full lifecycle: design - build - bring-up - validation - manufacturing support.
• BSEE or MSEE (or equivalent experience).

Responsibilities

• Lead bring-up of newly fabricated boards: power-on, section-by-section checkout, first-time debug to root cause.
• Plan and run design verification/validation campaigns - high-speed link testing, power measurements, functional test.
• Partner daily with the design team; drive fixes into the next board revision.
• Contribute to schematic and layout work on next-generation boards as bandwidth allows.
• Hand off validated hardware to the RF/antenna team and support their measurement needs.

Skills

Board-level design

Lab bring-up & test

High-speed digital design

Lifecycle experience

Education

BSEE or MSEE (or equivalent)

Tools

Oscilloscopes

Logic analyzers

High-speed test gear

Job description

Job role:

The team designs the satellites' phased-array antenna electronics: meter-wide, 20+ layer boards carrying thousands of components - including three families of Amazon custom silicon (beamforming, modem, network processing) - linked by ~25 Gbps high-speed digital buses. Boards are coming back from fabrication faster than the design team can validate them. That's where you come in: senior EEs who can do real board design and own hardware in the lab.

• Lead bring-up of newly fabricated boards: power-on, section-by-section checkout, first-time debug to root cause.
• Plan and run design verification/validation campaigns - high-speed link testing, power measurements, functional test - and document results to program standards.
• Partner daily with the design team; drive fixes into the next board revision.
• Contribute to schematic and layout work on next-generation boards as bandwidth allows.
• Hand off validated hardware to the RF/antenna team and support their measurement needs.

What we're looking for

• Experience of EE board-level design: schematic capture, complex dense multilayer PCBs, power delivery and sequencing.
• Hands-on lab strength - the heart of this role: board bring-up, debug, and validation; fluency with oscilloscopes, logic/protocol analyzers, and high-speed test gear.
• High-speed digital experience: multi-gigabit SerDes/interfaces (e.g., JESD204, PCIe, 25G+ Ethernet, DDR) and signal/power integrity awareness.
• Full lifecycle experience: design - build - bring-up - validation - manufacturing support.
• BSEE or MSEE (or equivalent experience).

Nice to have

• Satellite, aerospace, or space-qualification experience; phased-array or radar hardware exposure.

Boards built around custom ASICs/SoCs; RF familiarity as a secondary skill; FPGA familiarity; Python bench automation