Position OverviewYou will join a small electrical team that touches everything that fires, measures or sequences at Longshot: high-voltage pulsed ignition, firing and sequencing control, instrumentation and data acquisition, safety interlocks, and vehicle avionics and power. You will design and build circuit card assemblies (CCAs), microcontroller and FPGA firmware, harnesses, and the test procedures and scripts that verify them.
Early-career engineers here get real ownership fast. You will design circuits that go on the launcher, build and debug them with your own hands, and be in the bunker when they fire. Expect to split your time between the bench, the CAD tool and the test site.
What you'll do- Design, build and debug electrical hardware for test articles: ignition and trigger circuits, control boards, sensor conditioning, power distribution and harnesses.
- Capture schematics, lay out or review PCBs, and produce wiring diagrams and harness drawings.
- Write and debug microcontroller or FPGA firmware for control, sequencing and test systems.
- Help derive and document requirements, specifications and interface drawings for the assemblies you own.
- Integrate and check out instrumentation and data acquisition - pressure, strain, acceleration, timing - and turn raw test data into usable results.
- Write test procedures, checkout reports and issue reports; keep your designs under version control.
- Support test campaigns on-site: pre-test checkouts, interlock verification, operations and post-test teardown.
- Raise technical issues early, chase problems to root cause, and bring the fix.
- Work every day with mechanical, software and test engineers to close out interfaces and fix what breaks.
What you bring- BS in Electrical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering or a related field (0-2 years of experience).
- At least one internship or co-op, or substantial personal / team project experience. Rocketry, Formula SAE, robotics, coilguns, Tesla coils, power electronics, a home lab, a research rig - tell us what you built, what broke, and how you fixed it.
- Solid fundamentals in analog and digital circuits and power electronics.
- Hands-on with lab equipment: oscilloscope, DMM, power supplies, soldering and crimping.
- Schematic capture and PCB layout experience (Altium, KiCad or similar) - ideally a board you designed, had fabbed, and brought up yourself.
- Experience in working with C/C++ on a microcontroller, and Python for test automation or data analysis.
- Comfortable with Gitlab
- Demonstrate owning your piece, meet commitments, and flag items early on when something is slipping.
- Ability to adapt fast, work on hardware, and be able to support mission critical deadlines.
Nice to have- Exposure to high-voltage or high-current circuits (capacitor banks, pulsed power, motor drives), and the safety practices that go with them.
- FPGA experience (Verilog/VHDL).
- DAQ systems (NI, Dewesoft, LabVIEW) or sensor signal conditioning.
- Internship or co-op in aerospace, defense or test engineering.
- Experience on a test stand or in a hazardous-test environment.
- Active U.S. security clearance or eligibility to obtain one.
The pay range for this role is:
120,000 - 140,000 USD per year (Alameda, California)
