Senior Electronic Design Technician
industrial_energy_operations › Electronic Design · S3 — S3 — Senior Support Specialist · Support
An experienced technician who performs advanced circuit layout, prototyping, and testing support for electronic and chip design projects.
Median pay · United States · annual
$49,566 USD
▲ +32.8% vs S1 on this ladder
Typical range ()
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What this role is
An experienced technician who performs advanced circuit layout, prototyping, and testing support for electronic and chip design projects. At the Senior Support Specialist (S3) level, the role owns escalated / complex cases, complex or non-standard cases, and drives resolution quality on the team's hardest cases. Guides junior support informally.
What this level does
- Independently execute moderately complex PCB layouts balancing signal integrity, power distribution, and library management, exercising judgment on routing and placement trade-offs within the given specification
- Run and interpret SPICE and FPGA timing-analysis results (synthesis, place-and-route on Xilinx/Altera), deciding which non-routine follow-up measurements are needed to validate a design concept
- Troubleshoot prototype boards and bench setups when standard test procedures produce unexpected results, isolating faults to component, connection, or fixture with little day-to-day instruction
- Prepare and run design verification and EMC/regulatory pre-compliance test sequences (UL, FCC, CE, IEC), organizing evidence for engineer sign-off
- Coordinate lab and prototype build tasks across a project, sequencing rework and retest so validation stays on schedule
- Knowledge applied
- Detailed knowledge of layout, simulation, and verification procedures sufficient to handle non-routine tasks — interpreting timing/SI results and choosing follow-up tests — and to carry out routine work independently.
- Complexity & problem solving
- Moderately difficult tasks requiring judgment; troubleshoots prototypes and non-standard test results, deciding what to measure next with little instruction.
- Collaboration & interaction
- Substantial procedural understanding; coordinates lab and build tasks across a project without formal leadership authority.
- Typical experience
- 2–4 years; skilled in the electronic-design support function.
Skills at this level
- Schematic capture and PCB layout
- — Captures circuits and lays out printed circuit boards in EDA tools such as OrCAD and Altium Designer, balancing signal integrity, power distribution, and footprint/symbol library management.
- SPICE circuit simulation
- — Runs and interprets circuit simulations directly from the schematic environment in PSpice/SPICE, including mixed-signal cases, to validate design concepts and compare against bench measurements.
- HDL / FPGA design flow
- — Sets up and executes the FPGA build flow — VHDL/Verilog synthesis, place-and-route, and timing analysis on Xilinx and Altera platforms — to bring up and validate programmable-logic prototypes.
- Embedded systems bring-up
- — Wires, programs, and debugs embedded test rigs built on ARM, Microblaze, or Nios processors and real-time operating systems to support hardware validation.
- Prototype assembly and rework
- — Populates, solders, reworks, and wires prototype boards and subassemblies, and prepares them for controlled bench testing.
- Bench measurement and troubleshooting
- — Sets up lab instruments and test fixtures to measure circuit behavior, isolates faults to component, connection, or fixture, and records results into the test log.
- Regulatory compliance testing
- — Runs design verification and EMC pre-compliance test sequences against UL, FCC, CE, and IEC standards and assembles the supporting evidence for engineer sign-off.
- DFM/DFT support
- — Reviews layouts and builds for manufacturability and testability, working with manufacturing and suppliers to adapt the fabrication and test handoff for standard and non-standard builds.
- Component library and BOM management
- — Creates and maintains footprint/symbol libraries, design rules, and bills of materials, reconciling vendor part numbers and substitutions with purchasing and stockroom.
- Test documentation
- — Compiles measured and simulated data into structured test reports and specification documents following the group's documentation format and revision control.
- Test automation scripting
- — Writes MATLAB and Python routines to drive bench instruments and post-process measurement data for characterizing designs that manual methods cannot capture reliably.
- Technical communication
- — Conveys build status, test findings, and procedure changes clearly to design engineers, manufacturing, and less experienced technicians, both orally and in writing.
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As of · 2026-07-30
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