Hardware Test Lead

About the role

Your job is to build the machine that hunts down our hardware's weaknesses and gets that data in front of the people who can fix them. You will guide what we test, how hard, what's automated, what stays in-house, what goes to a lab-and the culture that grows up around it.

The Role

Establish the hardware test system, team, and culture. Define what good testing looks like here-what tests need running, when, and why; what evidence counts; where the bar sits; and how seriously we treat a failure. Derive reliability and abuse-test requirements from how our products actually get deployed and mistreated, and make sure every campaign's data lands back in design decisions. We're small, so you'll still get your hands dirty establishing the team, facilities, equipment, systems, and culture.

Concretely, here are some of the things you'll work on in the first few months:

• Own DVT and certification - Plan and run DVT campaigns covering environmental, mechanical, and electrical stress, EMC, abuse, HALT, and lifetime reliability. Run pre-compliance EMC in-house; drive FCC, CE (EN/CISPR), and UL submissions through external labs.
• Systematize our qualification - Codify our qualification campaigns: how we decide what testing to run, pass/fail criteria, sample sizes, traceability, and how we document it.
• Reliability and abuse testing - Work out what the field will do to our hardware, and decide how to stress it to establish margin beyond our ratings.
• Close the loop - Establish RCA practice for field failures, and fold every lesson back into the test suite and the next design revision.
• Automate - Anything we run 3x gets scripted. Push testing into fixtures and automation so every new product gains coverage faster.
• Build vs. outsource - Choose what we test in-house versus send out. Manage lab relationships, and build the business case for capital equipment when owning the gear wins.
• Build the team and the culture - Set the standard for how testing is done and how failures are treated, so it survives contact with growth. As we scale, hire and mentor test engineers into it-starting with the one we're hiring alongside you.

This is an early-stage team-you'll define how hardware qualification works here and how it scales as the product line and production ramp.

Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of hardware test and qualification - In automotive, aerospace, defense, or industrial products. You've personally taken hardware through DVT and certification, end to end.
• Test judgment - Deep knowledge of reliability, abuse, environmental, and electrical stress test methodology, and the instinct to set conditions from the product's actual deployment.
• DVT ownership - You've written DVT plans from product requirements through execution and reporting, and held the exit bar.
• Data fluency - You characterize margins statistically, spot trends across campaigns, and present findings that engineering and leadership can act on.
• Hands-on - Environmental chambers, electronics test gear, EMC instrumentation, vibration equipment, and general bench tools are your natural habitat.
• Enough Python and Linux - You can sequence automated tests using existing frameworks and instrument APIs, and you're at home in a Linux shell.
• Vendors and budgets - You've managed external labs, negotiated test scope, and justified equipment spend to people who sign checks.
• Clear writing - Your procedures, reports, and equipment justifications are auditable and actually get read.

Bonus Skills

• Formal certification experience - FCC, CE, or UL submissions you've driven end-to-end.
• Extreme-environment products - Wide temperature range, UV, salt fog, IP-rated enclosures; solar/battery or low-power electronics.
• Manufacturing test - Defining production test coverage and working with contract manufacturers on functional test.
• Failure analysis techniques - Cross-sectioning, X-ray, SEM.
• Built it before - You've stood up a test function or team from scratch at an early-stage hardware company.