System Hardware Engineer

The Opportunity  

The Engineering Team at AttoTude consists of a world class team working in a fast-paced and agile environment developing next generation modems for intra-DCI applications. The System Hardware Engineer will be part of the system team and responsible for contributing to the development and product realization of THz MODEMs. The ideal candidate will be prepared to work with early prototypes, establishing benchmarks and evaluation of product performance with rapid feedback to design teams. Performance characterization will include component and system level measurements, model matching, assessment of modem SNR and impairment penalties. The system team works closely with component designers and the candidate should anticipate frequent interactions on signal processing and performance issues. A key component of this role is the ability to understand and make tradeoffs to optimize the overall system performance.

Roles and Responsibilities  

The successful candidate will play a pivotal role in helping to develop AttoTude’s next generation communications platform and will be responsible for maintaining a testbed for MODEM characterization and optimization. Your experimental data will fuel our designs, starting with prototypes and evolving into the final product. This requires ownership of the testbed, measurement metrology, calibration methods, and stabilization techniques. You will characterize hardware, analyze results and provide rapid feedback into hardware architecture and design teams. You will assess the signal processing, both off-line and real-time, for measurement of bit-error rate in the presence of impairments and work to diagnose any issues.

Through frequent interaction with other engineering teams, you will assist in developing algorithms for optimizing performance and transitioning realized performance gains to volume production.

Qualifications, Skills, and Requirements

• PhD in Electrical Engineering or Applied Physics with specialization in high speed electronic or electro-optic communication systems
• Experience and solid understanding of coherent modulation formats, like QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM
• Extensive understanding of communication system transmission penalties
• Experience characterizing high-speed RF and mm-wave interconnects, amplifiers and components such as S-parameters, jitter, ENOB, nonlinear compression and their system implications
• Experience in the characterization and modeling of linear and nonlinear signal impairments, e.g., filtering, noise, nonlinear amplitude and phase distortions, dispersion, etc.
• Familiarity with statistical analysis and methods