S5
jf_electronic_design::S5
Lead Electronic Design Specialist

Lead Electronic Design Specialist

industrial_energy_operationsElectronic Design · S5 — S5 — Principal Support Specialist · Support

Serves as the go-to technical authority for analog, digital, and chip layout design challenges across projects.

Median pay · United States · annual

$60,631 USD

+62.4% vs S1 on this ladder

Typical range ()

$44,537$82,541

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5 of 8

Track

Support

Family rungs priced

S1 · S2 · S3 · S4 · S5

17-0000

Coordinates

3 / 4 spaces

pay@2 · 2026-07

What this role is

Serves as the go-to technical authority for analog, digital, and chip layout design challenges across projects. At the Principal Support Specialist (S5) level, the role owns function-wide support practice, program-level and systemic support problems, and drives support strategy across the function. Subject-matter authority; shapes the practice.

What this level does

  • Create and codify lab, layout, and verification procedures for the group — writing the standard bench-measurement, EMC pre-compliance, and prototype-bring-up methods others follow
  • Develop new fixturing, probing, and test-automation techniques (MATLAB/Python scripts against bench instruments) to characterize designs that existing methods cannot measure reliably
  • Establish and maintain component-library, footprint, and design-rule standards across projects, resolving the complex library and DFM/DFT issues that block layout signoff
  • Serve as the lab's technical reference for regulatory compliance testing, defining the internal pre-scan sequence and evidence package that gives designs the best chance at UL/FCC/CE/IEC certification
  • Facilitate and lead the technician team's execution on complex builds, providing peer guidance and training and contributing hands-on know-how into engineers' design-for-manufacturability and design-for-test decisions
Knowledge applied
Highly skilled specialist who contributes to the creation of new lab, layout, and verification procedures and standards within electronic-design support, and defines the techniques others use.
Complexity & problem solving
Resolves the most complex library, DFM/DFT, and measurement issues; develops new fixturing, automation, and characterization techniques where none exist.
Collaboration & interaction
Acts as working lead/facilitator for the technician team, provides peer guidance and training, and feeds hands-on expertise into engineers' design decisions.
Typical experience
6+ years; expert in the electronic-design lab/layout specialty.

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.

Model-authored from 7 retrieved sources, then adversarially reviewed by an independent judge panel and held to a minimum-evidence floor before publication. Distinct from corpus-extracted content, which is labelled as such.

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As of · 2026-07-30

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