Hardware Engineer — Munition System

JOB DESCRIPTION

Recruiter Note
: Candidate must be comfortable completing an initial 1-month onsite training period in 
Kearneysville, WV,
 after which they will relocate back to work from 
either San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Washington DC
.
End Client:
 Kela Technologies (Kela Defense)
About the project
We're building a small, safety-critical kinetic munition delivered by an FPV-class airframe. The compute side is an electro mechanical safe and arm device (EMSAD).
You'll own the electronics — from schematic, through PCB layout, through bring-up and qualification of every board in the system.
What you'll do
• Architect and design the main EMSAD board and auxiliary boards.
• Handle schematic design and multilayer PCB layout.
• Define hardware safety architecture with redundant interlocks and fail-safe defaults.
• Build and run bring-up benches and first-article validation.
• Collaborate closely with firmware engineers on drivers and timing.
• Drive environmental qualification: thermal, vibration, EMC, ESD, drop testing.
• Own BOM management, DFM/DFT, and factory tester development.
Required
• 5+ years of professional electronics design experience.
• Strong knowledge of low-power MCUs, mixed-signal systems, power supplies, sensors, and RF-adjacent layout.
• PCB layout expertise in tools such as Altium, KiCad, or Cadence.
• Hands-on lab debugging skills using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, DMMs, and soldering tools.
• Experience debugging complex hardware issues including EMC and brown-out edge cases.
• Strong written and verbal English communication.
Nice to have
• Safety-critical or fail-safe hardware design experience.
• Experience with S&A or fuzing electronics.
• Familiarity with MIL-STD-810 / MIL-STD-461 testing.
• FPV / small-UAV electronics experience.
• DFT for high-mix low-volume manufacturing.
How we work
Small team, weekly hardware iterations, prototypes always in the lab. We expect engineers to drive electrical decisions, document them clearly, and stand behind them during qualification and field validation.