Senior Electronic Engineer

Senior Electronics Engineer (High-Speed Digital / SoC Board Design) | Defence UAS | South East England, On-siteAre 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.The roleYou 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 wattsImaging payloads with LWIR cores, optics and video pathsNavigation that survives GNSS jamming and spoofing, including terrain-relative and star trackingRadio links that adapt modulation and hopping in the fieldWhat you'll doDesign processor and SoC boards end to end: device selection, power architecture, boot, debug accessRoute DDR and high-speed serial interfaces to meet timing, with full stackup and impedance controlOwn signal and power integrityIntegrate IMUs, magnetometers, barometers and GNSS receivers, and design the front ends around themDesign radio and antenna interfacesDesign for EMC alongside a demanding motor inverter noise sourceBring boards up on the bench and define the hardware/firmware interfaceWork with power electronics and mechanical teams, and carry designs through to manufacture and testWhat you bring8 to 10 years of hands-on electronics design, with boards that reached production or a qualified prototypeHigh-speed digital design (SoC/processor boards, DDR, high-speed serial)Practical SI/PI: stackup, controlled impedance, decoupling, return pathsMixed-signal and sensor integration in electrically noisy environmentsRF/connectivity: radio modules, transceivers, antenna matchingPCB layout in Altium Designer (or equivalent) on dense multi-layer boardsBench bring-up with debug probes, scopes, and logic/protocol analysersExperience defining hardware interfaces with firmware engineersNice to haveDevelopment boards or reference designs for a semiconductor company (a strong fit)Flight control, avionics, robotics or other safety-relevant embedded platformsAerospace/defence electronics, DEF STAN 59-411 or MIL-STD-461 experienceGNSS integration, CAN/DroneCAN, Ethernet/USB at hardware levelEmbedded vision, SoM integration, or edge inference hardwareFormal high-speed simulation experienceDegree in Electronic or Electrical EngineeringThis is an on-site role in South East England.Interested, or know someone who should be? Send me a message or comment below and I'll share more detail.#ElectronicsEngineering #HardwareEngineering #PCBDesign #Altium #EmbeddedSystems #Defence #Drones #UAV #Avionics #FPGA #HighSpeedDesign #SignalIntegrity #Hiring