Test & Applications Engineer — High-Power Switching

Test & Applications Engineer - High-Power Switching

Cenfire · Goleta / Santa Barbara, CA · On-site, lab-based · Full-time

The short version

We make a new kind of power switch. It is a silicon MEMS device: a CMOS-compatible spring that opens and closes in under ten microseconds, carries an amp per square millimeter, stands off hundreds of volts, hot-switches, and has been cycled past six billion operations. If you have characterized relays, contactors, solid-state switches or power semiconductors, you already know the measurements that matter: standoff, leakage, contact resistance, switching time, hot-switch life, thermal limits. Nothing off the shelf makes those measurements on a part like this. We need an engineer who wants to build the bench, the boards and the software that prove what this device can do, and then carry that knowledge to the customers designing it in. Nobody arrives with MEMS switch experience; you will learn the device here. What you bring is the high-power applications experience.

You will own both sides of the DUT. On one side: the load boards, interposers, fixtures, instrument control and automated measurements that characterize and qualify the switch. On the other: the evaluation kits, reference designs and driver circuits that put it into a customer’s module. A Product Engineer will hand you a characterization request: what we need to know about the device and under what conditions. You will take it from “we need to measure this” to a repeatable, version-controlled setup that produces data they can trust, and you will take a customer problem from first call to a proof of concept our design team can productize.

What you will do

Characterize the device. Design and build benchtop setups for high-voltage standoff, high-current conduction, temperature versus current, switching time, and low-leakage measurement in the pico- and femtoamp range. Run new die configurations through the voltage, temperature and cycle corners the Product Engineer asks for. Analyze just enough to prove the setup is measuring what it claims, repeatably, then deliver the data.

Build the test hardware. Design, lay out, bring up, debug and rework PCBs: load boards and multiplexer boards for our in-house single-insertion tester, interposers for the RF evaluation board, thermal and high-power fixtures. Specify and manage the board houses and assembly subcontractors who build them. Document what you build so the next engineer can run it.

Write the software that drives it. Instrument control over VISA and SCPI for SMUs, electrometers, high-resistance meters, programmable supplies, electronic loads, thermal chambers and scopes. Measurement workflows and GUIs for the evaluation kit. Data pipelines that get results from the bench to the Product Engineer in usable form, starting with a thermal-analysis pipeline for our high-power switch array. Everything in Git, everything with the safety interlocks a high-voltage bench requires.

Qualify the part. Build and run stress setups aligned with JEDEC JESD22 methods (HTOL, HTRB, temperature cycling, biased humidity) and switch-specific lifetime tests: hot- and cold-switching cycle life into the billions, contact resistance drift, standoff degradation. Design high-throughput, automated qualification setups as we scale.

Integrate it for customers. Build evaluation platforms (including an Arduino-compatible DC evaluation platform), competitor comparison boards and reference designs. Sit with customers to understand the circuit they are trying to build. Propose a solution, build a cost-effective and reliable proof of concept, hand it to the design team for productization, and support the customer through bring-up in their module.

What you bring

Required

• BS in Electrical Engineering, Physics or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated work.
• Four or more years of hands-on high-power applications work: relays, contactors, solid-state switches, power semiconductors (MOSFET, IGBT, SiC, GaN) or power conversion, in test development, product/characterization, applications or hardware engineering, with at least one project you took from blank page to working deliverable without being managed through it.
• You have worked at high voltage and high current on the bench, hundreds of volts and tens of amps or beyond, and you write the procedure that keeps others safe.
• You are a senior individual contributor, or ready to be one. This role has no team under it and no one above it writing your test plans. It sits below Director and at or above Senior Engineer on our ladder.
• You have designed, brought up and debugged your own PCBs (Altium, KiCad or equivalent).
• You have automated bench measurements against real instruments (SMUs, DMMs, scopes, supplies, loads, chambers) in Python, LabVIEW or similar. Our stack is Python and Git; if you come from LabVIEW you will be expected to make the switch.
• You understand device physics well enough to reason about what a measurement means: breakdown, leakage mechanisms, contact resistance, thermal limits, I-V behavior across temperature.
• You can explain a technical result to a customer and ask the questions that uncover what they actually need.

Strongly preferred

• Switch and relay characterization specifically: contact resistance, hot-switching life, arc and inrush behavior, standoff, coil or gate drive.
• Low-current measurement experience: guarding, settling, high-resistance meters, the pA and fA regime.
• RF switch or signal-path experience (our switch array runs DC to 6 GHz).
• MEMS experience of any kind is a bonus, not an expectation. MEMS fabrication or process experience is welcome but not what this role does; this is device-level test and applications work, not a cleanroom role.
• Reliability and qualification experience: JEDEC methods, stress setups, lifetime testing, failure analysis.
• ATE or production-test exposure: load/DIB board design, bench-to-ATE correlation, test-time and coverage trade-offs.
• Experience taking an evaluation board, reference design or demo from concept through a contract manufacturer to a customer’s hands.
• Embedded or FPGA work for test control and evaluation kits (microcontroller firmware, timing generation, data capture).

What this role is not

It is not a project-coordination or program-management role, not a software-only role, and not a narrow RF-only or digital-validation role. It is also not the Product Engineer’s job: you build the setups that answer characterization questions, and the deep analysis of what the data means belongs to the engineer who asked. The person who thrives here wants to hold the soldering iron and write the code, and wants to own the physics behind the number both produce.

Why you would want this

• You own the measurement, end to end. Goal, architecture, board, code, subcontractor, validation, data. Nobody hands you a test plan; you write it.
• The device is new, and so is the way to test it. Nothing off the shelf tests a part like this, so the benches, fixtures, boards and methods are still being built. What you build becomes the reusable platform for the products that follow.
• You see the whole product lifecycle from one seat. New die configurations, characterization, qualification, evaluation kits and customer integration all run through this team, and you work on all of them.
• Growth is defined. First year: benchtop characterization of the next die configurations, the thermal pipeline, and a steady flow of application references. Next step: Test Engineer owning high-throughput automated qualification and single-insertion qualification boards. Five-year path: Senior Applications Engineer helping define the next product and its ASIC.
• Small team, direct line to the design and founding team. Your characterization data is what the design team iterates on and what customers decide with.