Senior Electronics Engineer

About Seasats:

We are a nimble, highly technical business that provides defense, scientific, and commercial customers with maritime robotics solutions. Our primary products are autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) built to carry sensors at sea for months at a time.

The company is located in sunny San Diego and includes talented engineers, builders, tinkerers, and business architects. Internally, our work culture is hard working but fun. Externally, we’ve built a reputation for being professional, knowledgeable, and dedicated to getting the job done. For more info, check out seasats.com.

Role: Senior Electronics Engineer

Location: San Diego, CA (in-office)

Salary: $120,000-140,000 / yr + stock options, 401k matching, relocation assistance within the U.S. (if applicable), and other benefits.

About You:

• You’ve been designing, building, debugging, and hacking electrical systems (PCBs, cable systems, sensors) for years.
• You’ve worked on difficult technical projects as part of a team.
• You’re able to work autonomously.
• You have a keen understanding of deadlines and time constraints and modulate your methodology accordingly.
• You’ve produced documentation for board assembly, to facilitate firmware development, and to communicate systems designs to company leadership.
• You’ve designed an electrical system that has been produced in quantities of 50+ units.
• You have experience with Altium Designer.

The Details:

This is an exciting opportunity to be deeply involved in designing and building systems for a scaling fleet of oceangoing robots. Seasats has dozens of autonomous vehicles in customer hands across the globe and we’re in the process of 10xing our vehicle production and deployment rates. We’re looking for an experienced electrical engineer who has a knack for reliably delivering quality solutions when on a tight timeline.

Development speed is one of our core focuses at Seasats, so a typical project might look like this:

• Rapidly understand the project's design goals and key constraints
• Quickly lay out the key building blocks and communicate them in design meetings.
• Identify the highest risk items and initially focus on rapidly derisking them.
  • Often we kick off these steps early and then carry on with parallel development so that if things go well we’re two steps ahead. The cost to this is that you’ll occasionally have to throw some work in the trash.
• Design and execute a test plan to find issues and demonstrate functionality. Our systems are exposed to a variety of conditions in the field, so selecting test parameters that address compound worst-case scenarios is an important part of the design and test processes.
• Communicate findings and document outcomes in a practical manner.
• Refine the design as needed.
• Document how the production team should build the system, run it by the electronics production lead, and help the production team build first articles.
• In some cases, design test assemblies for the QA team to use.

You'll report directly to our CTO and will work with other testing, R&D, and production teams. As you ramp up, you’ll eventually be responsible for large projects that will span power systems, communications hardware, customer payloads and more. Some revisions and features will be glamorous and rewarding; others will be time-consuming and low-visibility to most of the team, though still vitally important.

Our customers depend on our vehicles to complete high value (and at times dangerous) missions. The reliability of the systems that you’ll be designing is critical, so you’ll need to independently balance a fast development pace with attention to detail, quality, and manufacturability.

This is an excellent opportunity to do high impact work, see your hardware go into live field robotics applications, and join a fun and hard working team on the cutting edge of ocean autonomy. Whether you’re a new grad or a 30 year industry vet, we expect an open-minded learning attitude from everyone at Seasats.

Life at Seasats:

Along with your salary, you’ll receive perks including:

• Stock options
• Competitive insurance (including a 99% employer-covered Gold HMO plan or other options)
• 401k matching up to 4% of salary
• Four free lunches per week
• An employee activity fund
• A pet-friendly office
• Unlimited/Flex PTO

We’ll help you ramp up and will regularly take time to discuss what’s working and what’s not. We’re also big on personal freedoms: if you’re on top of your responsibilities and want the afternoon off to surf or spend time with friends and family, go for it! We have flexible hours, accommodating PTO, and a personable, high-achieving work culture. We want someone who’s excited to work hard and have fun in this environment.

Our values are listed below; we’re happy to explain them more during the interview process.

• Get Stuff Done
• Be Kind
• Fight Entropy
• Attack with Overwhelming Force
• Ask More Questions
• Lines, Not Dots

Hiring Notes:

If you decide to apply, you’ll be asked to provide a resume and answer a few screening questions. If we decide to move forward with your application, you can expect no more than 2-3 more rounds of virtual interviews before a final in-person interview. If you have to travel to San Diego, we’ll reimburse pre-approved travel costs.

Please note that we are currently unable to sponsor employment visas, so candidates must be independently authorized to work in the United States.

We appreciate diverse perspectives and life experiences, so we encourage women, minorities, and people of all backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We look forward to reviewing your application!