Electrical Engineer (Instrumentation & Embedded Systems)

Job Description

Job Description

The role 

Alongside our magnet systems, we design and manufacture the electronic instruments that run them. Magnet power supplies, cryogenic temperature monitors, cryogen level meters, gaussmeters, and custom electronics for clients whose applications don't fit anything off the shelf.

This role owns that portfolio. You'll have the opportunity to maintain and advance the hardware, firmware, and/or host software across our instrument lines, carrying designs forward as components go obsolete, requirements change, and customers ask for capability that doesn't exist yet. You'll report to the Engineering Manager.

This is a broad role in a small company. The same person who traces a noise problem on a bench in the morning may be writing SCPI command handlers in the afternoon.

What you'll do 

• Design and revise analog, digital, and mixed-signal circuits for precision measurement and control instruments 
• Develop low-level embedded firmware for instrument control, measurement, and communication, including device drivers
• Implement, maintain, and extend host-side software and instrument drivers used by our customers 
• Carry existing designs forward through component obsolescence, cost reduction, and capability upgrades 
• Design and build custom instrumentation for one-off customer applications 
• Support production, calibration, and end-of-line test for the instrument lines 
• Troubleshoot field returns and drive corrective action back into the design 
• Maintain schematics, PCB files, firmware repositories, and design documentation 

Required Qualifications  

• Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from an EAC/ABET-accredited program 
• 5+ years of professional experience designing electronic products, ideally in an environment where you participated in either a full New Product Development (NPD) cycle or Engineering Validation Testing (EVT), Design Validation Testing (DVT), and Production Validation Testing (PVT) cycle 
• Demonstrated analog and mixed-signal circuit design, including precision measurement front ends, signal conditioning, and power regulation 
• Schematic capture and multilayer PCB layout in a professional EDA tool such as Altium or OrCAD 
• Embedded firmware development in C or C++ on microcontrollers, including peripheral configuration, bootstrap coding, real-time control loops, serial communication 
• Practical lab skill with oscilloscopes, DMMs, function generators, and power analyzers, and the ebugging instinct to use them well 
• Strong Microsoft Office skills, particularly Excel for test data
• Attention to detail that holds up in released schematics, firmware, and calibration procedures 
• Able to work on-site in Oak Ridge, TN full time 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with cryogenics, superconducting magnets, high vacuum, or low-temperature instrumentation 
• Precision measurement work, including low-noise design, four-wire sensing, high-resolution ADCs, precision references, and sensor linearization 
• Power electronics for programmable current sources or supplies, including regulation loops, thermal design, and protection circuitry 
• Instrument communication interfaces and command sets, such as SCPI over RS-232, USB, GPIB/IEEE-488, or Ethernet 
• EMI/EMC design practice and product safety compliance such as IEC 61010 or CE marking 
• Embedded firmware development 
• Experience taking over and modernizing designs  
• Git or comparable version control for both firmware and hardware 
• Practical LLM use in a technical context 

Growth and tooling  

You'll have real ownership here, and a product portfolio small enough to actually understand end to end. That combination is hard to find, and it's the reason engineers stay in roles like this. Superconducting magnet and cryogenic measurement work also builds domain expertise that few employers can teach. We encourage practical use of our internal AI tooling for design, firmware, and documentation work, within defined procedures for handling proprietary design data. Performance is reviewed at six months, at twelve months, and annually after that, with pay and responsibilities moving alongside demonstrated capability.

Compensation and benefits 

Salary is dependent on experience, full-time exempt. Health, dental, vision and life insurance, 401(k) contribution matching, and a competitive PTO policy.

We've built superconducting magnets and cryogenic systems in Oak Ridge for more than 40 years. Our systems end up in universities, national labs, and industrial facilities worldwide. We enable research for cyclotron resonance, ion trapping, materials science, medical devices, quantum computing, energy, gyrotron development, and more. We pioneered cryogen-free magnet systems and build nearly everything in-house, seeing projects through from design to delivery.

Company Description

We've built superconducting magnets and cryogenic systems in Oak Ridge for more than 40 years. Our systems end up in universities, national labs, and industrial facilities worldwide. We enable research for cyclotron resonance, ion trapping, materials science, medical devices, quantum computing, energy, gyrotron development, and more. We pioneered cryogen-free magnet systems and build nearly everything in-house, seeing projects through from design to delivery.