Senior Electrical Engineer
About this role
We are looking for a Senior Electrical Engineer with 5+ years of experience to serve as a Responsible Engineer for critical electrical subsystems on our autonomous underwater vehicles. You'll join a fast-moving defense startup building attritable UUVs for the U.S. Navy, taking full ownership of designing custom PCBAs from scratch and bringing them all the way through to production. We need someone with deep expertise in at least one of three areas: high-speed digital electronics (custom Nvidia Jetson carrier boards), motor-control/drive electronics, or battery/power electronics and power distribution. This is a ground-up build — we're replacing off-the-shelf hardware with fully in-house designs and need someone who can sprint to an 80% solution and get hardware in the water within three months.
What will you be doing?
Designing custom PCBA boards in Altium Designer (or equivalent) and owning the full lifecycle from architecture through schematic capture, layout, prototyping, debug, and production
Bringing up new boards from scratch — debugging signal integrity issues, timing problems, and manufacturing defects using high-speed oscilloscopes and lab equipment
Working closely with embedded software engineers as the hardware counterpart, ensuring tight hardware/software integration on your subsystem
Making rapid engineering trade-offs to deliver sufficient-quality hardware on aggressive timelines, with designs optimized for power efficiency and underwater environmental constraints (conformal coating, power constraints)
Supporting field testing and sea trials, taking full end-to-end responsibility for your subsystem's performance from prototype through deployment
Company at a glance
This defense technology startup, founded in 2024 by veterans from SpaceX, Tesla, and Vast Space, develops multi-domain autonomous systems for the U.S. Navy at significantly lower costs than established competitors.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
SpaceX-inspired culture with strong Responsible Engineer model
Every engineer owns their system end-to-end: requirements, design, implementation, testing, field deployment, and production
Team moves fast, works hard, and expects urgency that early-stage defense demands
Values builders over researchers, first-principles thinking over inherited convention, and speed over process
Decisions driven by physics, test data, and product outcomes
No organizational handoffs or siloed responsibilities
Greenfield environment with no legacy code or inherited architecture
Hands-on engineering culture with work in lab, dive pool, and field deployments
Small elite team of ~7 people where every hire has outsized impact
Rapid iteration and intensity expected
Engineers make foundational technical decisions from scratch
Know someone who'd be great for this?