Senior Electronic Design Engineer

An established New Zealand electronics company with its own in-house engineering team is now hiring a Senior Electronics Design Engineer to take hardware from schematic through to production, across a range of long-lived products that need to keep performing, and keep being built, for many years. This is a newly created position, added to bring more design depth and proven experience into a capable hardware team.

In this role you will spend most of your time improving and redesigning existing products, with a real share of new product development alongside it. The team does not split work into narrow specialisms, so you will own each job yourself: capturing the schematic, laying out the PCB, generating manufacturing outputs, building and debugging prototypes, testing, and seeing the design released into production. Because the products stay in the market for a long time, a steady part of the work is keeping them buildable as parts reach end of life. That means specifying replacements that hold up electrically and will pass compliance again. You will spend real time in the lab proving designs against EMC and immunity requirements, using equipment such as oscilloscopes, signal generators, ESD guns, and surge and transient generators, and tracking down the cause when a board does not behave. When production or customers raise a hardware issue you will help resolve it, and you will keep manufacturability and cost in mind at every step, since the engineer who designs a board also lives with how it is built. This role suits an experienced electronics engineer with a proven track record who can contribute within the first few weeks with little hand holding, and who will enjoy sharing that experience with engineers earlier in their careers. Training covers internal systems and ways of working rather than the engineering itself. The team is close knit and long serving, and the work relies on day-to-day collaboration, so this is not a role that can be done remotely. Longer term, there are paths into a senior engineering position, product management, or team leadership.

This is a full time, onsite role based in Wellington, with some flexibility on start and finish times. Relocation support is available to candidates moving from elsewhere. Candidates based in Australia are welcome to apply, but full working rights in New Zealand are required. Benefits include fully paid comprehensive medical insurance, a subsidised social club, and a discretionary annual bonus.

Key Responsibilities:

• Redesign and improve existing products, taking each change from schematic capture and PCB layout through to prototype, test, and production release.
• Contribute to new product development projects from early concept through to launch.
• Design analogue and digital circuitry with manufacturability, reliability, and cost in mind from the outset.
• Produce manufacturing outputs and supporting documentation, including fabrication and assembly data, parts lists, and test records.
• Build, bring up, and debug prototype hardware at the bench.
• Plan and carry out design verification, including EMC and immunity testing for ESD, surge, transients, and radiated fields.
• Specify and qualify replacement components as parts reach end of life, confirming each substitute performs and keeps the product compliant.
• Review supplier notices about part changes and judge their impact on current designs.
• Help production and support teams diagnose hardware issues and put lasting fixes in place.
• Take engineering changes through formal review and release, and share knowledge with less experienced engineers in the team.

Requirements:

• Degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering or an equivalent qualification.
• At least 5 years of hands-on electronic design experience, ideally closer to 10.
• Strong analogue and digital circuit design skills, and the ability to lay out your own PCBs.
• A track record of taking designs from schematic through prototype, test, and release to production, with a practical understanding of design for manufacture.
• A solid grasp of EMC design practice, and experience verifying designs against immunity requirements such as ESD and surge.
• Experience specifying component substitutions on products with long service lives.
• A proven, self-sufficient profile that needs minimal ramp up beyond learning internal systems.
• Confident lab debugging skills, clear communication, and a collaborative approach that suits a close working team.

Desirable but not essential:

• Experience with Altium Designer or a similar PCB design package.
• A background in industrial, embedded, or other electronic products built for long service lives.
• Familiarity with product compliance and certification processes.
• Experience working closely with an electronics manufacturing operation, and with PLM or ERP systems.
• Experience mentoring other engineers, and professional engineering registration or eligibility for it.

Please reach out to harold@profoundpeople.com.au for more info