Founding Electrical Engineer

Founding Electrical EngineerInstance Labs is building a machine that transforms an idea into a finished and tested circuit board, allowing engineers to iterate on electronics and solve the hardest problems in the physical world faster than ever before. The next frontier of human innovation is in the physical space, and we are creating the tools that will allow that future to become a reality.We are seeking dedicated and creative individuals who are ready to create meaningful work. If you are ready to change the future of engineering, we would love to hear from you. We're in San Francisco, building the first machines.We are hiring a Founding Electrical Engineer who can iterate across a wide range of engineering disciplines on some of the hardest problems in robotics and electronics. This will involve designing the electrical systems behind a fully autonomous circuit board fabrication machine, including custom electronics, test and measurement systems, sensing, motion control and the software that controls them. If you are up to the challenge of thinking outside the box while owning every component along the way, this role is perfect for you.Design, prototype and bring up custom circuit boards for sensing, actuation, measurement and controlBuild high-accuracy test fixtures, harnesses and instrumentationDevelop electrical systems for precision autonomous machines operating within microns of toleranceDebug complex failures across electronics, firmware, software and mechanical systemsBuild out an agentic harness for the PCB fabrication machineWe are looking for a senior-level engineer from a company that builds real hardware. Someone who is electrical to the core but has never let that be the whole job. If you spend your evenings watching engineering videos, only to spend the rest of your time thinking about all the ways you could have improved the design, you're who this posting is for.The requirements, in priority order:Electrical engineering depth, non-negotiable.

You think in circuits, signals and failure modes. You are comfortable iterating rapidly across a wide range of electrical concepts rather than working on one subsystem you have optimised for years. You have personally designed, brought up and debugged circuit boards, and you can talk in specific numbers about their performance, accuracy and limitations.A track record at a company that ships hardware. Senior engineer or technical staff at a Tesla, SpaceX or Figure-calibre company, a strong robotics company, a defence programme or somewhere the thing you designed had to survive production and the field, not just a demo.Real test and measurement experience. You are comfortable with oscilloscopes, logic analysers, power supplies, signal generators, data acquisition systems and custom test fixtures. You know how to isolate a failure at the bench rather than replacing parts until something works.Mechanical and systems intuition. You do not need to be a mechanical engineer, but you need to understand how electronics behave inside a physical machine. Motors, sensors, heat, vibration, tolerances, grounding, noise and packaging are all part of the job.You learned to code before AI.

You understand real fundamentals and can write the firmware or software needed to control, test and debug the hardware you build. AI tools are welcome here, but only in the hands of someone who can debug what they generate because they could have written it themselves.EE, CS, ME or physics from a top programme, or intense work experience. We prioritise the type of work you have done first.We're a tiny team racing to build capabilities for prototyping that nobody has built before. If that's not the season of life you're in, this is the wrong role.You own subsystems, not tickets. You'll be handed a problem, a budget and a bench, and you'll own it from a circuit schematic, system architecture or test plan to a working thing with numbers behind it.Bench rigs before design marathons. A rough fixture proving the idea this week beats a perfect board revision next month.Question everything. We question every component, system and requirement, then ruthlessly remove what is unnecessary until we reach an acceptable solution. Intellectual honesty comes before anything else.This role is probably not for you if:You want a clean specification handed to you.

Most of your job is figuring out what that document should even look like.You only want to design boards and hand them to another team for bring-up, testing and integration.You need a full lab team of technicians to build and debug your systems. For a while, you are that team.You want to specialise. You could be debugging a power rail on Tuesday and tuning a motor controller or sensor system on Wednesday.Why this is a rare job:Almost nobody with a senior title at a big hardware company gets to design the electrical architecture of a new machine from a blank sheet again. Here, you have the opportunity to create and prove novel electrical systems from scratch while watching the machine be shipped and used by customers, all within a year. As a member of the founding team, you will be doing it all with your name on the machine, at a company that intends to bring circuit board fabrication back to American shops.