{"id":1260831,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shield-ai-staff-electrical-engineer-hardware-test","title":"Staff Electrical Engineer, Hardware Test (R6121)","company":{"id":50,"name":"Shield AI","domain":"shield.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/shield-ai","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":61,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.803,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":76,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Hardware","role_family":"Hardware","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":185000,"max":275000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":275000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T16:34:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T01:43:11Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":22,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":22},"description":"Job Description:\nShield AI is seeking a Staff Electrical Engineer to define and lead the electrical test-equipment strategy that enables X-BAT hardware to move from rapid development through qualification, integration, and sustained operation. The Hardware Test Engineering team builds the multidisciplinary systems used to characterize, stress, verify, and troubleshoot mission-critical aircraft components and subsystems.\nYou will be the technical authority for a portfolio of electrical test capabilities rather than a single stand or project. You will establish common architectures, engineering standards, safety practices, and lifecycle expectations; align capability roadmaps with program risk and verification needs; and lead the most ambiguous or consequential test-equipment efforts from concept through deployment. Your influence will extend into aircraft design through design-for-testability, interface definition, reliability learning, and closed-loop corrective action.\nThis is a hands-on staff individual-contributor role with broad organizational reach. You will remain close to schematics, code, hardware, and lab operations while multiplying the effectiveness of other engineers through architecture, reviews, mentorship, reusable platforms, and clear technical decisions. Direct people management is not required.\nWhat success looks like\nCreate a coherent test-equipment architecture and roadmap that closes the program's highest-risk verification gaps and supports development, qualification, and recurring test needs.\nStandardize reusable electrical, software, data, safety, calibration, and documentation patterns that shorten delivery time without weakening rigor.\nIncrease equipment reliability, diagnosability, maintainability, and utilization while reducing recurring failures, manual interventions, and one-off designs.\nRaise the quality of aircraft requirements and interfaces by making testability, observability, fault isolation, and verification strategy explicit early in design.\nDevelop senior technical talent and create durable practices that allow the organization to deliver more capability through the team rather than through individual heroics.\nWhat you'll do:\nOwn the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for electrical test equipment supporting X-BAT avionics, power, communications, actuation, and other aircraft subsystems.\nIdentify program verification risks and capability gaps; convert them into prioritized investments, platform decisions, development plans, and clear technical ownership.\nDefine common architectures for racks, stands, interface units, power and fault insertion, instrumentation, data acquisition, timing, automation, diagnostics, and operator interfaces.\nLead the most complex or novel test-equipment programs through requirements, trade studies, architecture, detailed design, build, integration, acceptance, deployment, and sustainment.\nSet and uphold engineering standards for schematics, PCB and harness design, calibration, documentation, and release readiness.\nEstablish system-safety expectations for energized test equipment, including hazard analysis, safe-state design, interlocks, isolation, emergency stops, access control, and verification of protective functions.\nChair high-consequence architecture, design, and readiness reviews; make or drive closure on cross-domain technical decisions and unresolved risks.\nPartner with systems and design engineering to define testable requirements, electrical interfaces, built-in observability, fault isolation, and verification approaches before aircraft designs are released.\nDevelop strategies for equipment reliability, availability, maintainability, calibration, obsolescence, spares, vendor support, and recovery from failures during critical test campaigns.\nLead cross-functional root-cause investigations that span test equipment, units under test, software, facilities, manufacturing, and supplier processes; ensure corrective actions improve both products and test capability.\nMake informed build-versus-buy decisions and provide technical direction to vendors, integrators, technicians, and partner teams delivering portions of the test ecosystem.\nDefine and use meaningful operating metrics such as first-pass acceptance, schedule predictability, equipment uptime, test repeatability, recurring anomalies, action closure, and reuse of proven designs.\nMentor senior and developing engineers, delegate architecture and project ownership effectively, and improve the quality of technical reasoning and review across the organization.\nRequired qualifications:\nB.S. in Electrical Engineering or a related STEM discipline, or equivalent practical experience.\n8+ years of relevant industry experience developing complex electrical hardware, automated test equipment, or multidisciplinary verification systems.\nA record of leading multiple hardware development cycles and delivering equipment or products from ambiguous requirements through release, deployment, and sustained use.\nDeep expertise in several relevant domains, such as power electronics, analog and digital design, RF and communications, instrumentation, data acquisition, control systems, signal integrity, grounding, or system safety.\nDemonstrated ability to architect systems that span custom electronics, commercial instruments, harnessing, embedded control, automation software, mechanical equipment, and facility interfaces.\nStrong command of requirements decomposition, interface control, verification planning, design reviews, configuration management, acceptance testing, and technical documentation.\nExperience establishing technical standards or reusable platforms and influencing teams beyond direct project authority.\nDemonstrated success resolving complex cross-domain failures using data, first-principles reasoning, structured root-cause analysis, and disciplined corrective action.\nAbility to communicate technical decisions, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to engineers, operators, program leaders, and executives.\nA record of mentoring engineers, raising technical quality, and delivering exceptional outcomes in a fast-moving environment.\nPreferred qualifications:\nExperience architecting aerospace or defense ground-test, qualification-test, hardware-in-the-loop, or production-test systems for flight-critical hardware.\nExperience across several aircraft electrical domains, including high-voltage or high-power systems, batteries, motors and drives, RF, avionics networks, sensors, flight controls, or mission systems.\nExperience scaling a test capability from early prototype equipment to configuration-controlled platforms used across multiple teams, sites, or product phases.\nExperience applying safety and reliability methods such as hazard analysis, FMEA, fault-tree analysis, proof testing, fault insertion, redundancy, and safe-state verification.\nKnowledge of environmental and qualification testing such as thermal, vibration, shock, HALT, HASS, ESS, EMI or EMC, and the controls and instrumentation required to execute it well.\nWorking knowledge of standards such as DO-160, MIL-STD-810, MIL-STD-461, IPC, IEEE, NFPA 70E, or equivalent standards relevant to prior work.\nExperience with calibration systems, measurement uncertainty, metrology, data traceability, equipment cybersecurity, or regulated lab and production environments.\nExperience developing capital-equipment plans, managing technical suppliers or integrators, and balancing capability, schedule, cost, and lifecycle risk.\nEligibility to obtain a U.S. security clearance if required by the program.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7592,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Simulation & Digital Twin Software","Defense Manufacturing","Robotic Components & 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