Hardware Engineer

Sr. Hardware Engineer

Location: Santa Clara, CA Duration: Full-time/Perm

Client Labs Inc., a leader in purpose-built connectivity solutions for data-centric systems, is seeking a Sr. Hardware Engineer in Santa Clara, CA with experience in development and design of circuit boards around semiconductor products which employ high-speed communication protocols like PCIe, Ethernet, InfiniBand, DDR, NVMe, USB, etc.

As an client Labs Sr. Hardware Engineer, you will be part of a team that designs boards featuring client Labs' portfolio of connectivity products used in the world's leading cloud service providers, server and network OEMs. In this role, you will need to create hardware specifications to showcase cutting-edge SoC performance, carry board designs from concept through bring-up, and drive innovation by providing insightful feedback to other internal teams to continuously improve products and processes. There are opportunities to interact with key customers directly to both solicit form factor input and propose complete board products.

Basic Qualifications

• Strong academic and technical background in electrical engineering. At minimum, a Bachelor's in EE is required, Master's is preferred.
• Minimum of 5 years' experience in system level board design, from component selection and schematic capture through board bring-up, debug, optimization, and validation.
• Entrepreneurial, open-minded behavior and can-do attitude. Think and act with the customer in mind!

Required Experience

• A strong background in high-speed board design techniques and methodologies, preferably in the enterprise and data center system space, such as PCIe add-in cards, servers, JBOGs/JBODs, networking switches/routers/interconnects, etc.
• Knowledge of schematic capture and PCB layout tools from Cadence, Altium, and others.
• Low/mid-voltage circuit design (48V or 12V/3.3V bus) including DC/DC POL converters, low speed serial interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART), glue logic, and general analog design.
• Designing systems with high speed NRZ/PAM4 SerDes-based protocols such as PCIe (3.0 and above), Ethernet (25G and above), etc. and/or memory interfaces such as (LP)DDR4/5.
• Silicon/PCB bring-up and debug experience.

Preferred Experience

• Working with mechanical and thermal teams to create achievable system design specifications.
• Hardware design around FPGAs and/or MCUs, including pin mapping and evaluation of different SKUs against a list of hardware requirements.
• Designing complete high-speed channels which may include IC sockets, connectors, and cables.
• Working with silicon characterization/validation teams to ensure device performance is readily achievable in customer systems.
• Technical writing skills to generate clear, precise documentation such as hardware specifications and user's guides for internal and customer-facing audiences.