Head of Hardware Engineering

Advanced Navigation is the world’s most determined innovator in AI robotics and navigation technologies across land, air, sea and space applications. Founded on a culture of research and discovery, Advanced Navigation's mission is to be the catalyst of the autonomy revolution. Fields of expertise include artificial intelligence, underwater sonar, GNSS, radio frequency systems, inertial sensors, robotics, quantum sensors and photonics. Today, Advanced Navigation is a supplier to some of the world's largest companies, including Airbus, Boeing, Google, Tesla, NASA, Apple, and General Motors. Discover it for yourself: https://youtu.be/F7uAqs1gtuk

Overview of the position

Playing a critical role within our Research and Development team, our Head of Hardware leads the way in our next generation of navigation and robotics products. This role is responsible for managing a highly technical team, ensuring that projects run to time and deliver on their key performance specifications. Our Head of Hardware is also responsible for the design and development of electronics circuits for Advanced Navigation technologies utilising analogue signal processing and digital circuits. This role enables you to have a broad responsibility within a multidisciplinary team, to drive better design and project execution. As our Hardware Manager, this role contributes across the entire design phase to prototype, develop and then design to planning and supporting the manufacturing complex products. The products that are designed will be used in a range of applications in defence, autonomous vehicles, underwater vehicles, aerospace platforms and other advanced industries.

Role and responsibilities

• Lead the hardware team, including Electronics, FPGA & Mechanical and set technical direction and goals;
• Prepare and participate in performance reviews for their team;
• Drive continuous improvement in development practices, for example V&V automation and toolchain selection and maintenance;
• Establish and ensure that team-specific quality control practices and guidelines are created and followed;
• Be the key point of accountability when working with other disciplines;
• Estimate development time and effort when required for project planning;
• Mentor junior team members, interns etc. and help them progress professionally;
• Collaborating with the software team to ensure designs are well-integrated;
• Create personal work packages with clearly defined, agreed deliverables;
• Provide regular progress updates to project/functional managers;
• Identify scope and schedule risks and address/raise them with management;
• Work with a high degree of autonomy, turning high level goals into executable work packages;
• Driving accountability within the team to ensure that timelines are met;
• Oversee your teams & talent productivity, building a highly inclusive culture ensuring team members thrive & Company outcomes are met;

Qualification, skills and experience

• Bachelor degree or higher in or electrical/electronic engineering
• 10-20 years of experience in high-level electronics design roles and/or hardware management
• Experience managing highly technical teams
• Experience designing and developing complex electronics
• Significant experience developing precision analogue data acquisition/processing and high speed digital circuits
• Experience turning high level discussions into detailed, personal work package plans and reporting progress to management
• Experience planning and scheduling your own work over short and long term time horizons
• Structured problem solving and debugging skills
• Exposure to FPGA will be highly regarded
• Experience with optics or photonics will be highly regarded
• Exposure to systems engineering principles and practices will be highly regarded
• Experience with photonics or navigation systems will be especially highly regarded
• Very high level of proficiency using industry-standard tools such as SPICE, Altium Designer,
• Some skill in Matlab or similar tools
• Be highly motivated with an energetic, responsive and decisive disposition;
• Strong knowledge of WHS practices;
• Proven high standard of attention to detail, time management and “follow-through”