Principal / Lead Hardware Engineer

The Opportunity

Principal / Lead Hardware Engineer Location: Luton, Bedfordshire (LU1) Duration: 12 Months Onsite: 90% onsite Rate: £95.44ph UMBRELLA Security: We seek an engineer with recent high-integrity or safety-critical industry experience (defence, aerospace, or similar), or eligible for UK security clearance. The Opportunity We're looking for an experienced Principal / Lead Hardware Engineer to join a major defence programme developing advanced electronic systems for air, land and maritime platforms. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on complex FPGA and processor-based hardware, contributing throughout the full product lifecycle—from requirements capture and architecture through detailed design, integration, verification and qualification. You'll be working alongside multidisciplinary engineering teams to deliver high-performance electronic hardware for safety and mission-critical applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop complex digital and mixed-signal electronic hardware.
• Develop hardware architectures for FPGA, SoC and processor-based solutions.
• Produce schematics and support PCB layout for high-speed digital designs.
• Design and validate interfaces such as DDR memory, PCIe, Ethernet and other high-speed protocols.
• Integrate hardware with embedded software, firmware and FPGA solutions.
• Carry out simulation, verification, validation and design analysis activities.
• Support board bring-up, hardware debugging and fault investigation.
• Work collaboratively with Systems, Software, Firmware, RF, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering teams.
• Support environmental, EMC/EMI and qualification testing.
• Produce technical documentation throughout the engineering lifecycle.
• Support system integration, demonstrations and customer acceptance activities where required.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong background in high-speed digital hardware design within defence, aerospace or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience designing FPGA and SoC-based hardware (Xilinx, AMD, Intel/Altera or equivalent).
• Proven experience designing complex multilayer PCBs, including: High-speed serial interfaces DDR memory High-performance processors FPGA-based digital signal processing
• Experience using schematic capture and PCB design tools such as Altium Designer, OrCAD, Xpedition or equivalent.
• Hands-on board-level debugging using oscilloscopes, logic analysers and protocol analysers.
• Experience integrating hardware with embedded firmware and software.
• Strong understanding of signal integrity, power integrity and timing analysis.
• Experience supporting verification, validation and qualification activities.
• Ability to translate system requirements into robust hardware designs.

Desirable Experience

• Electronic Warfare, Radar, RF, Communications or Sensor technologies.
• Development of safety-critical or mission-critical systems.
• FPGA signal processing.
• Knowledge of DO-254, DEF STAN, MIL-STD or equivalent industry standards.
• Hardware design reviews and technical leadership.
• Design for Manufacture (DfM), Design for Test (DfT) and Design for Reliability (DfR).