DC Instrument Board Lead

Job Title: DC Instrument Board Lead
Location: North Reading, MA
Duration: 12 Months Contract (Contract to Permanent)
Pay range: $67.00 to $108.00 per hour on W2

Job Description:
We are looking for an experienced hardware engineer to serve as the technical owner of one or more DC instrument boards. You will own the design from architecture and schematic development through layout direction, bring-up, characterization, qualification, and volume release. Depending on program requirements, the board may be a high-current device power supply or a four-quadrant source-measure instrument.

Responsibilities:
Design and Own the Board

• Translate system specifications into board-level requirements and tradeoffs across accuracy, transient response, density, power, thermal performance, cost, and schedule.
• Architect DC sourcing and measurement circuits from microamps to more than 100 A.
• Develop fast-response voltage/current forcing, droop control, range switching, references, sequencing, and power distribution.
• Design four-quadrant output stages, including bidirectional power delivery, quadrant crossover, regulation, and compliance clamping.
• Verify safe operating area across required voltage and current ranges.
• Own force and measurement paths, including sensing, ranging, guarding, Kelvin sensing, settling, and leakage performance.
• Lead schematic capture, component selection, design-for-cost, and multilayer PCB layout direction.

• Optimize power integrity across the instrument, cabling, load board, and device under test.
• Analyze and mitigate droop, overshoot, ringing, and ground bounce during fast load transitions.
• Simulate control-loop stability, compensation, and transient response across sourcing, sinking, reactive loads, and operating quadrants.
• Maintain error budgets for offset, gain, drift, noise, leakage, and thermal effects.
• Design protection for overcurrent, overvoltage, overtemperature, short circuits, and fault isolation.
• Lead hardware bring-up and root-cause failures across hardware, firmware, software, and system interfaces.
• Execute characterization plans for regulation, transient response, efficiency, thermal behavior, fault handling, noise, and drift.
• Guide the design through compliance, DFM/DFT, pilot build, and volume release.

• Ensure the module meets ATE requirements for timing, triggering, synchronization, calibration, and software control.
• Partner with firmware on control loops, telemetry, calibration, sequencing, and fault reporting.
• Serve as the board’s primary technical contact across programs and engineering disciplines.
• Manage board-level schedules, risks, mitigations, and recovery plans.
• Mentor engineers and review schematics, simulations, analyses, and characterization results.
• Develop reusable circuit blocks, design guidelines, and engineering standards.
• Guide vendors and contractors and support field-issue investigations.

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in electrical engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Six or more years in power electronics, precision analog, source-measure, or instrumentation hardware design.
• Experience owning a board from architecture through production release.
• Strong knowledge of regulation, power-stage design, feedback systems, control-loop stability, power integrity, transient analysis, and PDNs.
• Experience with precision analog circuits, including operational amplifiers, instrumentation amplifiers, references, and Client/DAC interfaces.
• Experience with bidirectional or four-quadrant circuitry, including source/sink stages, current-mode regulation, compliance clamping, source-measure units, electronic loads, bipolar supplies, or battery-emulation channels.
• Proficiency with SPICE simulation, PDN modeling, schematic capture, PCB design tools, and multilayer mixed-signal layout.
• Hands-on lab experience with power measurement equipment and high-current test configurations.
• Ability to troubleshoot across hardware, firmware, software, and system interfaces.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, influence without authority, and clear engineering communication.

• Experience designing automated test equipment instrumentation, device power supplies, four-quadrant instruments, bench metrology equipment, electronic loads, or battery-emulation products.
• Knowledge of dynamic voltage scaling, digital power control, telemetry, FPGA, and microcontroller interfaces such as SPI, I2C, and LVDS.
• Experience with high-channel-count designs, thermal modeling, heatsink design, derating, reliability engineering, and long-term stress testing.
• Experience with hardware/firmware co-debug and Python or MATLAB for characterization, automation, or data analysis.
• Experience working with contract manufacturers and improving DFM/DFT.