Senior Hardware Design Engineer - Space Industry

Aurora Avionics is an ambitious Edinburgh-based space technology company developing advanced electronic systems for next-generation spacecraft. As the company continues to grow, we're looking to speak with talented Hardware Engineers who want to work on genuinely challenging technology and have real ownership over what they design and build. This is a hands-on engineering role spanning the full hardware development lifecycle from initial requirements and architecture through detailed electronic design, prototyping, testing, verification and ultimately flight-ready hardware.

As a Hardware Engineer at Aurora Avionics, you'll design and develop complex electronic systems, working closely with the wider engineering team to turn requirements into robust, reliable hardware. This isn't a role where you'll simply inherit completed designs. We're looking for someone who enjoys solving difficult engineering problems and can demonstrate genuine depth in electronic hardware development.

What you'll be doing:

• Designing electronic hardware from concept and requirements through to production and verification
• Analogue and digital circuit design
• Schematic capture and PCB design/development
• Component selection and design trade-offs
• Developing prototypes and bringing up new hardware
• Debugging complex electronic systems at board and system level
• Hardware testing, validation and verification
• Supporting design reviews and providing clear engineering rationale behind design decisions
• Working with embedded software, systems and mechanical engineers on integrated products
• Supporting manufacturing, assembly and test activities
• Investigating failures and implementing design improvements
• Producing high-quality engineering documentation
• Designing with reliability, manufacturability and challenging operating environments in mind

What we're looking for:

We're particularly interested in engineers who can demonstrate real ownership of hardware designs. You should be comfortable talking in depth about products or systems you have personally designed and explaining the engineering decisions you made along the way. Ideally, you'll bring experience in several of the following areas:

• Electronic hardware design
• Analogue and digital electronics
• PCB and schematic design
• Power supplies and power electronics
• Microcontrollers, processors and associated circuitry
• Communication interfaces and protocols
• Sensors and signal conditioning
• Component selection and lifecycle considerations
• Hardware bring-up and debugging
• EMC/EMI considerations
• Design for manufacture and test
• Verification and validation
• Root-cause analysis and fault finding

Experience within space, aerospace, defence, automotive, robotics or another safety-critical/high-reliability environment would be particularly valuable, although we're equally interested in strong engineers from other complex hardware backgrounds.

What matters to us:

Your industry background matters less than your engineering depth. We want to understand what you've actually designed. What decisions were yours? What went wrong? How did you debug it? What trade-offs did you make? How did you take something from an idea or requirement to working hardware? If you enjoy that level of ownership, you'll fit well at Aurora Avionics.

Why Aurora Avionics?

You'll be joining Aurora Avionics at an exciting stage of its growth, with the opportunity to have a genuine impact on both the technology being developed and the engineering culture around it. You'll work alongside a highly capable team, solve technically challenging problems and help develop hardware intended for real-world space applications. If you're looking for somewhere you can build, experiment, solve problems and take ownership, we'd love to hear from you.