Hardware Systems Engineer
The Hardware Systems Engineer will own hardware development for industrial CT scanners, spanning electrical architecture, MCU firmware, and system integration. This hands-on role involves prototyping, testing, and collaborating with engineering and product teams.
About the job
About the Role:
The Hardware Group is looking for a Hardware Systems Engineer to join our San Francisco office and own the breadth of hardware development for a new class of industrial CT scanners. You’ll span electrical architecture and design, MCU firmware, and system integration, partnering tightly with other engineering and product teams to bring prototypes from concept through to shipping product. This is a hands-on, highly interdisciplinary role. You will be the hardware generalist closest to the product in San Francisco, collaborating with our team in Cambridge to carry system-level decisions all the way down to boards, firmware, and integrated prototypes. You’ll work alongside a small, fast-moving team that values curiosity, rigor, and system-level thinking. This is a full-time, in-person role based in our Cambridge, MA office.
What you'll do:
- Drive the system architecture. Translate product-level requirements into a clear split across mechanical, electrical, and firmware, and make the buy-vs-build calls on the components that matter.
- Select and qualify the critical parts (motors, sensors, actuators, motion controllers, power supplies) and own the rationale and tradeoffs.
- Handle the light CAD yourself: MCAD for brackets, mounts, and fixtures; ECAD for embedded platforms and smaller PCBAs.
- Build the prototypes. Turn a wrench, pull cables, bring up boards, and bring a pile of parts up to a working integrated system.
- Write drivers for the peripherals you pull onto the product and land them in the appliance firmware and application stack with the Systems Software team.
- Own test and validation. Plan it, fixture it, run it, analyze the data, and push corrective actions back into the design.
About you:
- Several years of hands-on experience taking a complex electro-mechanical or robotics product from blank page to working hardware.
- Breadth of knowledge in mechanical design, electronics, and embedded code. You don’t need to be the best in the room at any of the three, but you’ve done all three on real products.
- Comfortable enough in MCAD and ECAD to produce your own simple designs without handing them off to a specialist.
- A tinkerer at heart - you chase ambiguity into the hardware and keep digging until you understand why a system behaves the way it does.
Bonus points for:
- Background in motion control, closed-loop systems, or sensor fusion.
- Shipped a hardware product from first prototype to production at volume.
- Experience with X-ray systems or other radiation-emitting equipment.
Skills
Mcad, Ecad, Firmware, Robotics, Motion Control, Sensor Fusion, X-Ray Systems
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