Hardware Systems Engineer
The job description
Tech stack. System architecture, requirements management, interface control documents, system modeling, integration planning, trade study analysis, verification planning, risk registers
About the role
You will own the technical definition of complete hardware systems at a company building multi-subsystem products where integration risk is the biggest schedule threat. Hardware systems engineers translate product requirements into architectures, allocate budgets across power, thermal, cost, and mass, and define the interfaces that let specialized teams work in parallel without collisions. You will live in the trade-offs: no subsystem is perfect, but the system as a whole has to be excellent. Clear writing, quantitative reasoning, and the courage to say no to bad ideas early are your core tools. This role suits engineers who think in systems first and components second.
What you will achieve
- Deliver complete system architectures with allocated power, thermal, cost, and mass budgets that subsystem teams can actually design against with confidence
- Author interface control documents covering electrical, mechanical, and software boundaries, eliminating ambiguity before detailed design starts
- Drive requirements traceability from product requirements through subsystem specifications to verification test plans with demonstrably full coverage
- Resolve cross-subsystem conflicts such as EMI versus cost or thermal versus performance with data-driven trade studies and clear recommendations
- Deliver integration test plans that verify the system as a whole, catching interface problems in the lab before they ever reach customers
What you will bring
Must-haves
- 2 to 5 years in hardware engineering with exposure to system-level thinking through architecture, requirements, or integration responsibilities
- Experience writing clear technical specifications that other engineers can build from directly without ambiguity, rework, or interpretation gaps
- Understanding of systems concepts: requirements decomposition, interface management, and verification and validation planning
- Ability to run quantitative trade studies with weighted comparisons of competing approaches and honestly stated assumptions
- Familiarity with at least two hardware domains (power, RF, digital, thermal, mechanical) deeply enough to reason about their interactions
- Strong documentation discipline: versioned specs, decision records, and traceability matrices maintained as living documents
- BS in Electrical Engineering or related field with systems coursework or equivalent experience
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with SysML or model-based systems engineering tools for architecture capture and analysis
- Background in a regulated industry such as medical, aerospace, or automotive with formal V-model development
- Familiarity with reliability allocation: MTBF budgeting across subsystems and redundancy analysis for critical functions
- Experience leading technical reviews with stakeholders from multiple engineering disciplines
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