Hardware Compliance Regulatory Engineer

Hardware Regulatory Engineer

This position is onsite in San Jose, with approximately 10% travel to Asia.

Meet The Team

Common Hardware Group (CHG) Compliance team supports regulatory approval across various products like Cisco wireless access points, cellular routers, sensors, and many others. As part of the central hardware power engineering group, you will collaborate with various functions like Hardware Design and Test, ASIC Design and Test, Power Engineering, Signal Integrity, EMC / EMI, and Mechanical Design, expanding the breadth of your knowledge, designing power, and delivering amazing products to the market.

Your Impact

As a Hardware Regulatory Engineer, you will partner with hardware, RF/antenna, firmware/software, product security, and compliance teams to develop regulatory strategies and support EMC/RF validation.

• You will work with external test laboratories to ensure products achieve certification readiness and meet global regulatory requirements.
• Define EMC and RF regulatory requirements for global markets (FCC, CE, IC, RED, MIC).
• Define performance monitoring metrics during EMC/EMI testing.
• Develop compliance strategies early in the product design lifecycle to minimize certification risk.
• Review schematics and recommend filtering, shielding, grounding, and ESD protection solutions.
• Coordinate with JDM partner to address the design issues and come up with the EMC and RF test plan and provide PCB layout guidance on stack up, return paths, impedance control, and EMI mitigation.
• Ensure RF designs meet regulatory requirements for wireless technologies (WiFi, Bluetooth,5G NR, LTE, etc.).
• Plan and complete pre-compliance testing including radiated, conducted emissions, surge, ESD, EFT/B, Radiated immunity, Conducted immunity
• Collaborate with hardware, RF, mechanical, antenna design and manufacturing teams to ensure compliant product design.
• Build EMC test setups including cabling, grounding, support equipment, and worst-case operating modes.
• Configure traffic generators to create representative data loads and route traffic through DUT interfaces during testing.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, electronics engineering, RF Engineering, or related field with 7+ years of experience; or master's degree with 4+ years of experience or PhD with one year of experience.
• Experience with RF regulatory test requirements such as DFS (Dynamic Frequency Selection), Adaptivity, Receiver Blocking, and AFC (Automatic Frequency Control).
• Experience with EMC compliance requirements and test methods for the test cases such as radiated and conducted emissions, immunity testing, and evaluation of product functional performance.
• Experience configuring test modes, monitoring RF performance degradation, and supporting compliance validation for Wi-Fi and other intentional radiator devices.
• Experience using spectrum analyzers, EMI receivers, vector network analyzers (VNA), signal generators, oscilloscopes, near-field probes, LISNs, and RF power meters.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with power electronics, power supply, or analog design, including knowledge in high-efficiency power topologies such as buck, buck-boost and flyback.
• Knowledge of component selection and materials affecting EMC performance.
• Familiarity with environmental and reliability standards impacting EMC performance such as temperature, humidity, vibration, and aging effects.
• Familiarity with system-level test automation tools such as Python, LabVIEW, MATLAB, or similar tools.
• Familiarity with cybersecurity and regulatory compliance frameworks impacting connected electronic products, including EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), India Commsec (Communication Security) requirements, and other applicable global cybersecurity standards.
• Experience developing automated test scripts or traffic profiles to monitor product performance during EMC immunity testing.