🛩️ Director of Electrical & RF Engineering
📍 Los Angeles County, CA
💼 Full-time | On-site | Relocation assistance provided
Why Join Us
My client is a high-growth aerospace and defense-tech company developing advanced autonomous hardware platforms for mission-critical applications. The team has scaled quickly over the past year and is now looking to bring on a senior electrical engineering leader to guide hardware architecture, strengthen engineering execution, and build deeper internal capability around RF/wireless systems, EMI/EMC, and platform-level integration.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can operate at the system architecture level, guide board-level electrical design, mentor teams, and grow the organization's electrical and RF engineering practices.
What You'll Own
- Lead and scale a growing electrical engineering team while building internal RF systems capability from the ground up.
- Identify team gaps, shape hiring needs, and strengthen ownership, documentation, and technical decision-making.
- Guide electrical design across complex embedded hardware, including PCBAs, power, compute, sensors, interconnects, and system-level integration.
- Ensure hardware designs are reliable, manufacturable, testable, and ready to move from prototype into production.
- Bring working knowledge of RF, radio communications, antennas, link performance, and wireless integration into hardware architecture decisions.
- Help build stronger internal capability around signal performance, interference, range, and real-world communications reliability.
- Drive disciplined validation across electrical and RF systems, including lab testing, field testing, debug, and design improvement.
- Support EMI/EMC, signal integrity, pre-compliance, environmental testing, and related design-for-compliance efforts.
- Partner with cross-functional teams to resolve system-level tradeoffs and integration issues.
- Communicate technical risks, priorities, and resource needs clearly across engineering and leadership teams.
Ideal Background
- Degree in Electrical Engineering or a closely related technical field.
- 10+ years in electrical engineering, hardware engineering, or electrical systems development for complex embedded/electromechanical products.
- 5+ years leading engineers, technical teams, or cross-functional hardware programs.
- Strong working knowledge of PCBAs, schematic review, board bring-up, embedded electronics, power architecture, sensors, compute, and system integration.
- Experience taking hardware through development, test, iteration, validation, and production release.
- Working exposure to RF/wireless systems, including radio integration, antennas, link performance, signal reliability, or communications hardware.
- Comfortable making system-level architecture decisions while still going deep enough to review designs, troubleshoot issues, and guide technical execution.
- Track record building team structure, improving engineering processes, and mentoring technical leads in fast-moving environments.
- Background in aerospace, defense, autonomous systems, robotics, eVTOL, med robotics, or other complex hardware products.
- Exposure to EMI/EMC, signal integrity, grounding/shielding, pre-compliance, or certification-driven hardware development.
ITAR Clause
To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State and/or the U.S. Department of Commerce, as applicable.