Research Engineer, Electrical

Team: R&D

Location: San Francisco, CA

Commitment: Full-Time

Workplace Type: hybrid

Role Description

Responsibilities

Contribute to the development of measurement performance requirements. Evaluate new sensors for current and new sensing capabilities.
Design and execute benchtop and full-scale experiments to characterize sensor and system performance.
Support investigations from fleet observations through exploratory data analysis of fleet telemetry, bench reproduction, simulation, and test execution. Investigate signal behavior and communicate findings.
Contribute to research of new sensing capabilities.
Help develop validation methods and implementation-ready technical recommendations.
Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and SW/HW/FW engineers.

Required Skills

MS in Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a closely related field and 2+ years of relevant industry experience.

Strong fundamentals in electromagnetics, signal processing, or circuits.

Hands-on experience contributing to physical experiments, measurement setups, hardware validation, or bench investigations.

Scientific computing: comfortable writing analysis pipelines in Python, MATLAB, or equivalent.

Experience collecting high-quality electrical measurements: have built and run custom measurement setups using standard lab instrumentation (scope/DAQ and related tools).

Clear technical communication and documentation skills.

Comfortable working on ambiguous technical problems and learning new domains quickly.

Relevant Depth Areas

You do not need to match every area below. Strong candidates will usually bring depth in one or two of these areas.

• Sensor characterization and validation: sensor performance evaluation from characterization, through test method development. Experience developing performance requirements and testing or validating sensing systems against those requirements.

• DSP in embedded systems: have applied DSP to real sensor signals in embedded systems. Competent in C/C++ (or similar low-level languages), timing, sampling, and sensor communication interfaces.

• Circuit simulation: have used SPICE-class simulation (LTspice/PSpice/ngspice/Spectre or similar) to model HW and perform investigations.

• Root-cause sensor signal issues: have investigated and solved signal/noise issues, e.g. identifying issues through exploratory data analysis, reproducing issues in simulation and on the bench, and implementing solutions.

• Physical sensing research: have researched new physical sensing capabilities using first-principles modeling, experiments, and sensor trade studies to evaluate feasibility and performance.

Bonus Skills

Design and automate validation: have designed system validation plans with explicit acceptance criteria. Have built or owned repeatable test infrastructure.
Experience with deployed IoT fleets (tens of thousands of devices) and developing “observability for sensor performance” e.g. telemetry design, health metrics, calibration drift monitoring.
Experience optimizing sampling and signal processing on constrained compute devices to reduce power and storage.