Electronics Engineer in Plymouth

A sensor board comes back from three months at sea with salt crystals under the conformal coating and a fault nobody can reproduce.

By lunch you’ve found it, a corroded joint dropping a rail under load, and by Friday your redesign is on the bench.

Next month you’re doing something completely different: designing the sensing chain that could make C-Star constellations the best in the world at detecting and classifying surface vessels, or integrating a custom sensor for the US Navy.

This is a broad engineering role with electronics at its centre.

You will own real hardware, from schematic to sea trial, and you will be expected to follow a problem wherever it goes.

The role

You own the hardware and software problems that come with new sensing methods and ever larger C-Star constellations.

That includes ground-up redesigns of C-Star subsystems, diagnosis of faults from sea trials, and integration of new sensors and payloads.

Your work will span most of what could be called engineering, but an electronics background is what will get you started fastest.

• What you might work on
• Designing and revising C-Star electronics: power management and solar charging, battery systems, sensor interfaces and microcontroller boards.
• Taking a board from schematic and layout through bring-up, bench test and environmental qualification.
• Building the sensing chain behind new detection and classification capability, from the transducer or antenna through signal conditioning to the data the customer sees.
• Integrating third-party and customer-specified payloads, including sensors set by naval and government programmes.
• Investigating failures on robots returned from months at sea: corrosion, water ingress, intermittent faults, power draw that does not match the model.
• Writing the firmware and test software needed to prove a subsystem works before it leaves Plymouth.
• What Oshen is

We make the ocean’s eyes and ears.

We tell people what is happening across the 70% of the globe covered by the ocean.

We do this with C-Star constellations, swarms of one-metre wind-and-solar robots that sail the open ocean.

Ours is the only surface robot to sail into a Category 5 hurricane and come back with the data.

We design and build them in Plymouth and deploy them for the US Government, the Royal Navy and climate scientists, giving information across an ocean the modern world depends on and currently cannot see.

If we succeed, navies will find dark ships and underwater threats before they reach critical infrastructure.

Governments will predict hurricanes and other extreme weather earlier.

Scientists will better understand how the ocean and climate are changing.

The people joining now will shape both the technology and the company.

Very few engineers get to take something from an idea in the workshop to a real mission in the Atlantic, then use what it learns to make the next one better.

Here, you can.

Who you are

• Strong electronics fundamentals: analogue and digital design, schematic capture and PCB layout, embedded systems, and the ability to debug real hardware with a scope, a multimeter and a clear head.

In practice you likely have a 2:1 or higher in electrical or electronic engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• Comfortable with the software that touches the hardware, typically C or C++ on microcontrollers and Python for test and analysis.
• Two to four years of experience is a useful guide, and better still if some of it was at a fast-growing startup. We will consider strong candidates earlier in their career.
• Able to reason from first principles across domains.

Many of these problems need mechanical, power, RF or software knowledge you do not have yet, and you will be expected to go and learn it.

• Evidence of self-directed technical work beyond a job or a degree.
• Maritime, subsea or defence experience is helpful but not required.
• How we work

Electronics that work on a bench in Plymouth and electronics that work after three months in the North Atlantic are different things (trust us, we’ve learnt the hard way many times), and finding out which you have built takes patience and honest testing.

You will have unusual ownership of real hardware, a close team around you and problems nobody has solved before.

If you want a tightly prescribed role with a fixed development plan and a specialist to hand for every question, this is probably not the right fit.

Compensation

• Equity: £25,000 – £90,000 of stock options at our most recent company valuation, depending on experience, implemented through an EMI options scheme.
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