Electrical Architect

About Northwood:

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company bringing the benefits of space to the masses through advanced communications technology. We are building a global network of phased array ground stations that enable real-time, reliable communication for satellite missions such as national security, global connectivity, and disaster response. With a vertically integrated approach, Northwood designs, builds, and rapidly deploys scalable systems that power the next generation of space missions. If you like solving complex challenges and seeing your work deployed around the world with real impact, Northwood is the place to do it.

Role:

Northwood is looking for an Electrical Architect to help drive the definition and architecture of our digital compute and power electronics systems. These complex digital systems ensure that our antennas can meet high-rate processing needs no matter where they are deployed around the world.

As the Electrical Architect, you will act as the Responsible Engineer for the electrical system, owning architecture decisions, driving system-level trades, and ensuring coherence across boards, subsystems, and disciplines. Our hardware team prioritizes excellent engineering, building end products that are known for their reliability, scalability, and cost.

Responsibilities:

• Own the electrical architecture and system-level design for high-speed digital communication systems, defining how RF and mixed-signal designs, complex multi-layer PCBs, and subsystems fit together

• Define system-level architecture for multi-gigabit networking and complex digital power trees, and drive system trades that shape architecture decisions across the product

• Set technical direction and review schematic capture, layout, and bring-up across a variety of digital systems including FPGAs, microcontrollers, and their associated peripherals

• Collaborate across hardware and software teams with RF engineers, antenna engineers, FPGA engineers, and firmware engineers to optimize system performance and overall design

• Guide prototype testing and performance assessment in the lab and in the field, with an eye towards system-level root cause and risk

• Partner with production teams to ensure the overall system architecture supports testable and manufacturable products that we can integrate in-house

Basic Qualifications:

• 5-7+ years of professional experience in electrical design, including experience operating at the system or architecture level

• Proficient in high-density/high-speed design (including FPGAs, high speed data converters, SerDes, 10/100 GigE, networking, JESD204C)