Lead Electronic Design Specialist
industrial_energy_operations › Electronic 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 ()
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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
Edition · canon-v2@2.1.0-complete
Source · canon-v2 cell + salary-benchmark (model)
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