Lead Digital Hardware Engineer (Contract)

£56.50 per hour umbrella / £50 per hour deemed ltd / £48.92 per hour PAYE (inclusive of holiday pay)

Job Role:

As the Lead Hardware Engineer, you will act as the technical design authority for all areas of the equipment hardware design. This equipment will include digital processor and cryptographic equipment destined for telecom and military payloads on various satellite platforms.

This role is for a hardware responsible engineer for flight equipment. The role entails hardware aspects of requirements management, detailed design and interface specification, test specification, reports and design analyses. Focus areas will include:

- Able to interpret circuit board designs accommodating multiple FPGA / ASICs and high-speed ADCs / DACs.
- Support to manufacture and test - may require travel to Portsmouth.
- Interface with many experts in other departments (e.g. radiation, EMC).
- Customer interface on technical issues.
- Generate, oversee and configure technical documentation.

Key Responsibilities:

- Coordination of all technical elements of the project, working with and overseeing the work of design engineers in the same functional team
- Produce digital electronic board specifications, from product or architecture requirements
- Define interfaces and digital parameters.
- Consider switching speeds, pulses, rise and fall times, feedback and interference, impedance of devices, signal transmission
- Define performance criteria and define how to prove validation and verification of performance with test strategy.
- Produce and review circuit diagrams, iterating design where necessary due to circuit analysis outputs and PCB layout constraints.
- Produce and review detailed design analysis e.g. WCA, PSA, FMECA/FMEA
- Work closely with other engineering teams to support detailed design in CAD/CAM or VHDL implementation on component/ equipment/ mechanical/VHDL level in accordance with engineering design rules.
- Interface with internal support functions e.g. radiation, thermal and mechanical design, EMC, parts procurement
- Lead technical interface to external customer and suppliers
- Provide progress updates to technical and project managers, provide inputs for scheduling and costing
- Lead engineering investigations, troubleshooting and problem resolution activity

Key Attributes:

Essential:

- High speed electronic circuit board specification, schematic capture, component selection and related analyses.
- Lifecycle experience of digital equipment - design / manufacture / test, including customer interfacing.
- Sector experience of aerospace, automotive or military production over five years
- Hardware used - debug and test validation of designs
- Software used - schematic capture, layout and simulation tools (e.g. Mentor Expedition)
- Standards/accreditations/methodologies - ESA/ECSS and MIL Standards
- Experience of team leadership, mentoring junior design engineers

Desirable:

- Mentor DxDesigner
- Requirements management (DOORS) and SoC / RFD management
- Space industry experience