Electrical Engineer, Circuit Design & Power Electronics
Location: Los Angeles, CA | On-site
Type: Full-time, Direct Hire

High Sierra Talent is partnering with an early-stage defense technology company in the Los Angeles area to hire an Electrical Engineer focused on circuit design and power electronics.

ABOUT OUR CLIENT
Our client is solving an urgent national security challenge with cost-effective, high-production-rate flight hardware. The team is small, deeply technical, and moves fast, with frequent live flight testing.

• Hardware is flight tested on a regular, fast-paced cadence
• Serves U.S. defense and allied customers
• Culture: fast, scrappy, deeply technical, and AI-forward. Engineers own design, build, and test end to end with minimal bureaucracy

THE ROLE
You will own the power and actuator drive electronics for our client's flight vehicles. Avionics sits on the critical path for every flight test, so your speed directly sets the pace of the program.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design power distribution and conversion systems, including battery management, power regulation, and protection circuits
• Own actuator drive electronics for the control actuation system: power stage, current sensing, motor commutation, position-interface front end, and motor-bus partitioning
• Create schematics, PCB layouts, and bring-up procedures for mission-critical analog and digital avionics
• Lead EMI/EMC design and validation, including power integrity, grounding, and mitigation strategies
• Partner with embedded software, systems, and controls engineers to integrate and tune hardware on the bench
• Build test infrastructure and validation procedures, and handle debugging, integration, and environmental testing
• Help define scalable electrical architecture standards for high-rate manufacturing

MUST-HAVES

• 5+ years in circuit design and power electronics
• Power systems experience in demanding hardware environments (aerospace, defense, automotive, robotics, or similar)
• Strong PCB design and layout with a system-level EMC approach (grounding, shielding, filtering, signal and power integrity)
• Hands-on lab experience debugging hardware and bringing up boards
• Proven ability to take designs from schematic to layout to integration and test
• Experience in a rapid development, 0-to-1 environment
• Daily use of frontier AI tools (Claude, Cursor, etc.) in your workflow
• BS in Electrical Engineering or related field
• U.S. Citizen or Green Card holder (no visa sponsorship available)
• Able to work fully on-site in Los Angeles, plus monthly weekend travel for test events and supplier visits

NICE-TO-HAVES

• Motor drive design (BLDC/PMSM power stages, gate driver selection, current sensing topologies, EMI mitigation on high-current buses)
• FPGA interface experience
• Qualifying hardware to DO-160 or similar environmental standards
• Background in defense, automotive/racing, robotics, EV, or high-performance mobility

TECH STACK
Altium/KiCad, schematic capture, SPICE, power electronics, BLDC/PMSM motor drives, gate drivers, current sensing, BMS, EMI/EMC testing, oscilloscopes and lab equipment, FPGA interfaces, embedded systems

COMPENSATION

• Base salary: $150,000 to $220,000 per year, depending on experience
• Meaningful early-employee equity

WHY THIS ROLE

• Real impact: ground floor on a genuine national security problem
• Visible work: your hardware flies every couple of weeks
• No waiting: avionics drives the schedule, so your velocity drives the company
• Strong comp: competitive base plus early equity

Interested? Reach out to High Sierra Talent to learn more and have a confidential conversation about the opportunity.