Staff Systems Electrical Engineer- Hardware Development

STAFF SYSTEMS ELECTRICAL ENGINEER Hardware Development · San Francisco ABOUT IMPULSE We’re Impulse. We’re a team of engineers, designers and innovators based in San Francisco who believe making good decisions for your home and the environment should not come at a cost to your lifestyle. We’re dedicated to building delightful, high-performance products for everyday needs that enable rewarding, long-term, scalable solutions for whole-home electrification. We're looking for individuals excited to join an early-stage, VC-backed growing company with powerful aspirations to make positive change in a major industry - come build with us! ABOUT THE ROLE We're hiring a Staff Systems Electrical Engineer to own the electrical architecture across our products: power stage, battery integration, control electronics, sensing, and the cross-functional interfaces to firmware, thermal, and mechanical. Most of our difficult problems cross discipline boundaries. In the cooktop, coil drive efficiency is a magnetics problem, a control problem, and a thermal problem at the same time. Emissions compliance is largely determined by layout and switching decisions made months before the first system-level test is completed. Driving the electrical architecture of the products you're responsible for, from concept through certification and production, requires someone who works comfortably at all levels and can make the tradeoff calls even when the answer isn't clear. Because we're building a product line rather than a single appliance, your products both inherit from and contribute to a shared platform. Deciding what to reuse, what to build specifically, and where to spend on flexibility we can't yet justify is a large part of the work. We're also changing how we build. We've relied on JDM partners for execution up to this point and will continue to run those programs, but we're bringing more architecture, design, and even manufacturing work in house. Leveraging your expertise to help guide this transition is another major area of responsibility for this role. WHAT YOU'LL OWN - System architecture. Partition functionality across boards, processors, and software. Own requirement flowdown from product spec to subsystem spec, along with the tradeoff analysis and documentation behind it. - Interfaces. Define and maintain the boundaries: hardware to firmware, board to board, electrical to thermal and mechanical. - Platform reuse. Decide what your products take from the shared platform and what they contribute back, and keep that boundary honest as the line grows. - Cross-domain problems. Control loop behavior across varying loads, sensing accuracy under thermal and electrical stress, noise coupling and emissions, fault detection and its coverage. - Design review. Lead electrical design reviews and set the standards our designs are held to. - Build versus buy. Own the technical analysis behind which subsystems we bring in house and which stay with partners, and build the standards and review process to support the ones we own. - Reliability and risk. Own DFMEA for the electrical system: drive the analysis and keep it tied to real design decisions rather than a document that gets filled in once. Set derating and component qualification standards, and own root cause on field and factory failures (e.g. MIL, EFFA). - Partner engineering. Act as the senior technical counterpart to our JDM and CM partners, some of them outside the US, including DFM and production test architecture. Will require travel, roughly 4-6 trips a year. - Compliance. Own the electrical path through EMC and product safety certification. - Internal tooling. Build the tooling that gives a small team leverage over a large system: characterization and analysis pipelines, design review support, documentation. We expect this to be increasingly AI-assisted. - Mentorship. Support the engineers around you through design review and time at the bench. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Required - 10+ years of relevan…