Electronic Design Engineer
industrial_energy_operations › Electronic Design · S4 — S4 — Lead Support Specialist · Support
Designs and verifies analog, digital, or mixed-signal circuits and chip layouts for hardware products.
Median pay · United States · annual
$56,408 USD
▲ +51.1% vs S1 on this ladder
Typical range ()
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What this role is
Designs and verifies analog, digital, or mixed-signal circuits and chip layouts for hardware products. At the Lead Support Specialist (S4) level, the role owns team process and quality, cross-case patterns and process gaps, and drives team-level quality and efficiency. Mentors and coordinates the support team.
What this level does
- Adapt layout and lab procedures in unfamiliar situations — devising fixturing, probing, and de-embedding methods for a new high-speed or mixed-signal board where no standard procedure exists
- Resolve conflicting bench, EMC, and simulation results by reasoning about implications for signal integrity and power distribution, and recommend design or test changes to the responsible engineer
- Own the DFM/DFT feedback loop with manufacturing and suppliers — reviewing layouts for manufacturability and testability and adapting the CAM/panelization handoff for non-standard builds
- Set up and debug FPGA/embedded validation rigs for new platforms, adapting the HDL build and RTOS bring-up flow when the reference procedure does not fit the hardware
- Act as a working lead on the prototype/lab bench, informally guiding less experienced technicians on layout conventions, measurement technique, and test-record discipline
- Knowledge applied
- Extensive detailed knowledge of layout, lab, DFM/DFT, and compliance procedures enough to adapt them in unprecedented situations — new board types, new FPGA/embedded platforms, novel measurement challenges.
- Complexity & problem solving
- Handles a wide variety of non-routine situations and conflicting results, understands the design implications, and recommends new solutions to engineers.
- Collaboration & interaction
- Interfaces with manufacturing, suppliers, and design engineers; may act as an informal working lead guiding less experienced technicians on the bench.
- Typical experience
- 4–6 years; advanced electronic-design support experience.
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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