Electrical Engineering Design Engineer

The Electrical Engineering Design Engineer will work with several groups at QRC, including the product development team consisting of software engineering, production, and test engineering colleagues to accelerate new hardware feature integration for our next-generation products. Ability and a passion to prevent and solve engineering problems are key aspects of this role. An ability to work both in analysis and in a hands-on engineering laboratory environment are essential.

The Electrical Engineering Design Engineer’s primary responsibility is designing digital and mixed-signal electronic, power electronic, and/or RF circuitry. The Electrical Engineering Design Engineer shall design the schematics and layouts of printed circuit boards, assemblies, and flex circuits, and will include prototype bench work and transitioning products to production. 

Additional responsibilities include:

• Perform systems and electrical engineering design tasks including requirements analysis, specification generation, interface definition, component selection, simulation, schematic capture, board layout, design verification testing, and production verification testing.
• Perform simulation, testing, and troubleshooting electrical designs, including bench testing and debugging using standard test equipment
• Participate effectively in multi-disciplinary engineering teams integrating the efforts of technicians, mechanical engineers, firmware developers, and software developers.  
• Develop test plans and procedures for verification designs; execute test activities such as design verification testing and production verification testing
• Follow QRC design guidelines as necessary to ensure conformity with industry standards and best practices. Proactively recommend refinement and enhancement to such guidelines as needed to maximize quality, profitability, and customer success
• Identify and work with suppliers of components and subsystems
• Oversee the work of others within the hardware group, including direct report administrative responsibilities and providing work direction if so asked

• Candidate must have 7 years (preferably 10) of design experience in digital and mixed-signal electronics. Experience must include design for manufacturing, design for test, and integration of engineering analysis with circuit synthesis.
• BS in Electrical Engineering or similar work experience (Master’s Degree Preferred)
• Candidates must be eligible to obtain a security clearance when sponsored by QRC
• Must have an in-depth understanding of appropriate PCB materials and knowledge of circuit layout techniques, should have at least 5 years of PCB layout experience on actual customer-facing shipped products.
• Must have a working understanding of EMI/EMC design guidelines for PCBs and systems.
• Must have knowledge of DAC and ADC specifications and performance evaluation.
• Must be able to identify parts or sub-components from the commercial market that meet our system requirements.
• Must be able to assist software engineers to develop register settings for loading synthesizers, DACs, ADCs, etc., to insure proper operation. Examples like calculating the proper register settings for PLL loop dynamics, AGC functions, output power, etc.
• Must have a good working knowledge of clock systems and how to jitter / phase noise.
• Must have good working knowledge of high-speed data transmission standards such as PCIe, 10GigE, HDMI, etc, and the ability to accurately consider impedance matching, trace characteristics, attenuation, and other factors in PCB design that impact transmission speeds
• In-depth experience with Altium Designer is strongly desired, including detailed knowledge about the software, its limitations, and its features.
• Candidate should be proficient in PCB part placement, footprints, Gerber files, maintaining part libraries, and designing for ease of manufacturing and test
• Direct experience routing high-speed digital signals (PCIe, USB, Gigabit, LVDS, clocks) and low-speed digital signals (RS-232, I2C, SPI), analog signal and power, and RF signals (up to 6 GHz) is required.
• Experience routing both single-ended and differential pairs is required.
• Candidate should be able to optimize designs for PCBs and flex circuits for density, cost, thermal issues, and other factors.
• Should have an understanding of EMC design guidelines for PCBs and systems.
• Must have strong written and interpersonal communication skills.
• Must be able to work both independently and within an Integrated Product Team construct to produce measurable results
• Must have experience using engineering analysis and development tools such as LabVIEW and MATLAB
• Past experience with rugged military requirements is desired
• Experience in the areas of signal processing, signal analysis, direction finding, geolocation, embedded systems, antennas, or communications systems is preferred.
• Broad knowledge of RF systems, understanding of RF concepts such as receiver sensitivity, dynamic range, noise figure, phase noise, and transmitter linearity and power measurements is preferred.
• An understanding of RF filter designs including LC, ceramic, SAW, BAW, crystal, distributed circuit, etc is preferred.
• In-depth experience with Keysight PathWaves electromagnetic M&S software is preferred.
• Experience designing and evaluating RF system architectures and working with RF components such as switches, limiters, up/down converters, attenuators, amplifiers, mixers, filters, etc is preferred
• Experience using RF test equipment including vector signal generators, vector signal and network analyzers, power meters, and high speed sampling oscilloscopes is preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to perform RF analyses such as: link budget, cascade NF and compression analysis, spurious and intermodulation search, and impedance matching of both lumped and distributed circuits is preferred.