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 relevant experience (or 8+ with an MS) designing electronics that shipped at volume, including at least two products taken from concept through mass production, with direct ownership of EVT/DVT/PVT gates, build support, and production test yield at ramp.
- Demonstrated ownership of system-level architecture: partitioning, interface definition, requirement flowdown.
- Involvement in building to BOM cost and COGS targets, with experience contributing to cost-down cycles and second-sourcing.
- Analog and mixed-signal depth: sensor interfaces, ADCs, signal conditioning, grounding and return paths.
- Embedded software fluency and debugging judgment across domains: enough fluency to specify and review firmware, and the ability to judge whether a symptom is electrical, firmware, thermal, or mechanical.
- Comfort using and building AI tools. We use LLMs and agentic tooling in daily engineering work — analysis, scripting, design review, documentation — and we're interested in people who build the tools they need.
- Experience taking designs through EMC and product safety certification (UL, IEC, FCC, or similar).
- Experience with design for safety and compliance, including mains isolation, creepage/clearance, and implementation of safety standards like UL/IEC 60730.
- Clear technical communication, in writing and in person. The ability to net out complicated technical topics for internal and external stakeholders at all levels of technical comprehension.
Nice to have
- Battery systems, BMS, or energy storage integration experience. Familiarity with battery safety/compliance standards (e.g., UL 9540A, UL 1973, IEC 62133) is huge plus.
- Power electronics: switch-mode converters, resonant inverters, magnetics.
- Induction heating, motor drive, or another high-power switching application.
- Platform or product-family architecture, where designs had to serve more than one product.
- Consumer appliance experience, including UL 858 or equivalent.
- Python and SCPI scripting for characterization and test automation.
- Experience building an in-house hardware capability that had previously been outsourced.
What’s in it for you
- Meaningful equity in a fast-moving company with top investors
- Generous benefits include health, vision, dental, commuter, and fitness.
- The opportunity to work on an actually cool technology product.
Impulse is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and prohibit discrimination and harassment. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees where everyone feels safe and welcome.
Our Interview Process
At Impulse, we want to make sure the fit is right for both you and us! Our interview process is designed to help us get to know each other better. Here’s what you can expect:
- Intro call with our People Operations Team.
- Interview with our Director of Engineering.
- Onsite interview with our Electrical and Hardware teams, our Principal Technical Program Manager, and our Software team
- A short conversation with our COO &/or Founder and CEO.
Job Location
San Francisco - in office (potential for 1-2 days a week remote)
Compensation Target
$170,000 - $185,000 depending on experience + competitive and meaningful equity
We’re excited to meet you and help you figure out if Impulse is the right fit for you!
About Impulse
Impulse to the rescue — the company’s stoves include a battery solution.