Remote Position
Senior Electrical Engineer — Power Units and Board Design
🌍 Remote · United States
💼 Full-time
Come join us in shaping the future! Get in on the ground floor as an early member of our Electrical Engineering team, working on a revolutionary satellite communications system. Own the units that power the spacecraft — design them, specify them, prove them.
AscendArc is a venture-backed startup founded to revolutionize the satellite communications industry. We are looking for doers who want to work in a ground-breaking and fast-paced environment. Our success will depend on your energy, skill, and creativity.
Responsibilities
You own power units. Subsystem architecture sits with the Principal Power Subsystem Architect; your job is to take the individual units — battery, solar array, power control and conditioning, power distribution — from requirements to qualified hardware, whether we build them or buy them. Roughly half the role is hands-on board design and half is unit-level engineering and supplier work.
- Own assigned power units end to end — battery, solar array wing, PCU/PPU, PDU — from requirements through design or supplier specification to verification and acceptance
- For units we build, design the electronics: distribution and switching, protection and current limiting, inrush and fault handling, DC/DC conversion, heater and thermistor acquisition, and the analog and digital interfaces around them
- Take those designs through topology and part selection, schematic capture, worst-case, derating and part-stress analysis, and support layout, fabrication, bring-up, debug and board test
- For units we buy, own the technical content: unit specifications and SOWs, technical evaluation of proposals, supplier design reviews, resolution of interface and requirement issues through the build, and acceptance data package review
- Own unit-level requirements and interfaces to the rest of the power chain and to the spacecraft, and keep them consistent with the subsystem architecture
- Select and defend EEE parts against radiation, quality and lifetime requirements for a 15-year GEO mission
- Own unit verification: test objectives, procedures and setups, data reduction, and anomaly investigation when hardware does not behave as designed
- Support spacecraft-level electrical integration, including grounding and bonding, power quality, harness and EMI/EMC, through to launch
- Provide unit-level inputs to the power budget and energy balance, and support architecture trades with analysis and data
- Work within the Systems Engineering baseline for requirements, interfaces and technical budgets
- B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering; 5+ years designing power electronics or analog and mixed-signal hardware
- Hands-on board design — circuits taken from requirements through schematic, analysis, bring-up and test, and you can show what you designed
- Unit-level ownership — accountable for a piece of hardware from requirements through acceptance, not a contributor to someone else’s box
- Power electronics depth: switching and linear conversion, protection and current limiting, inrush, fault isolation, and the failure modes that drive them
- Worst-case, derating and part stress analysis, and the ability to defend results at review
- EEE parts selection for space or another high-reliability domain
- Experience specifying and technically managing a procured hardware unit, including supplier design reviews and acceptance
- Comfortable at the bench — instrumentation, measurement and debug are part of the job, not somebody else’s
- Strong plus: spacecraft power units (batteries and cell management, solar array wings, PCU/PPU, PDU); EMI/EMC and grounding; magnetics design; firmware or FPGA familiarity; ECSS or equivalent space standards
B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering; 5+ years designing power electronics or analog/mixed-signal hardware; hands-on board design; unit-level ownership; power electronics depth; worst-case/derating analysis; EEE parts selection; procured hardware management; U.S. person required.
Key Responsibilities
- designing power units
- specifying hardware
- verifying systems
Job Details
- Category: Engineering
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time
- Workplace: Remote — United States
- Salary: USD 180,000 – 230,000 / year
- Languages: English
About AscendArc
A venture-backed startup revolutionizing satellite communications. — Industry: Information Technology