Hardware Engineer

Responsibilities

• Conduct design reviews of ECU circuit designs to ensure they meet industry standards and automotive requirements for SI, EMC, and electrical robustness.
• Run simulations to catch potential issues early, and follow up with lab measurements to validate.
• Define SI budgets for different parts of the system (board, cable, connector, etc.), keeping jitter, noise, crosstalk, and EMI/EMC in mind.
• Formulate board-level requirements for layout, interconnects, routing, and components.
• Create design verification test methods and run tests based on industry standards and internal requirements.
• Lead functional failure root-cause analysis and corrective actions for prototypes and production vehicles.
• Lead component-level qualification of networking components for use in Ford products by reviewing EMI/EMC, interoperability, and other conformance reports.
• Work closely with other Product Development teams (like EMC, Electrical Distribution Systems, and Vehicle Validation) to ensure SI is considered throughout the whole process.
• Provide technical guidance to Product Development teams on feasibility, design alternatives, and design oversight for in-vehicle network implementations.
• Collaborate with software and firmware teams during hardware bring‑up and testing.
• Build strong relationships with silicon, cable, and connector vendors to evaluate and introduce emerging technologies.
• Contribute to industry standards efforts to reduce component cost, improve test automation, and address common automotive challenges in collaboration with industry experts.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering or a similar technical field.
• 3+ years of experience in electronic hardware design, mainly focusing on complex high-speed digital and mixed-signal designs.
• 2+ years working with SI simulation or PCB design tools (e.g., Altium Designer, Mentor Graphics, Cadence Allegro, HyperLynx, SIwave, Polar Instruments).
• 2+ years of hands‑on lab experience using equipment like oscilloscopes, Vector Network Analyzers (VNA), Time Domain Reflectometers (TDR), and doing circuit board rework.
• Familiarity with standard automotive communication interfaces (CAN, LIN, SerDes, Ethernet).
• A solid grasp of transmission line theory, S-parameters, bit error rate (BER) testing, crosstalk, characteristic impedance, eye diagrams, and time-domain analysis.
• Good understanding of EMC/EMI principles in automotive settings.
• Experience with high-reliability electronics for high-volume production, including using DFMEA and Worst-Case Analysis (WCA).

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in electronic hardware design with a focus on high-speed digital and mixed-signal designs, including SI simulation and PCB design. Proficient in conducting design reviews, running simulations, and leading root-cause analysis in automotive environments.