Electrical Engineer - All Levels at EON in Culver City, CA

Job description

About EON EON is building the highest-throughput point-to-point data transport network ever deployed in space. Using free-space laser links in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), we move petabytes of data between any two points on Earth as an alternative to subsea or terrestrial fiber. EON recently closed a $10.75M seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst in their first-ever co-led space deal. EON is building out of its R&D center in Culver City. Today, approximately 95% of the global internet travels through a few hundred subsea fiber-optic cables, infrastructure designed in the early 2000s that has gone largely unchanged. Demand for new fiber has never been higher, but laying it is extraordinarily difficult: permits, ocean geology, and geopolitical boundaries make every new cable a years-long, billion-dollar undertaking. That bottleneck is a liability with cables at constant risk of being cut, whether by accident or adversarial action, and no amount of ground-based investment can fully solve it. The Role EON's optical hardware runs on electronics at every layer: the boards that drive and measure optical components, the high-speed signal chain under the coherent transceiver, and the flight electronics of the payload itself. We are seeking electrical engineers across these concentrations, and we'll put you where your depth matters most. You'll partner with the optical seats whose hardware your electronics power, drive, and measure, and work alongside the other EEs across the terminal and payload. Concentrations 1. Board-Level & Bring-Up You design and bring up the boards under every optical component: driver electronics (laser drivers, EDFA pump drivers, TEC controllers), photodetector and sensor readout, control and interface boards, bench power, and harnessing. You may excel here if you've owned boards from schematic through layout, and bring-up and debug with a scope in hand is your comfort zone. 2. Modem & High-Speed Mixed-Signal You own the high-speed signal chain under the coherent transceiver: ADC/DAC interfaces, low-jitter clocking, multi-Gbaud modem boards, and the FPGA gateware carrying real-time DSP. You may excel here if you've shipped multi-GHz mixed-signal designs or gateware validated on real hardware, and signal integrity is second nature. 3. Spaceflight / Payload Hardware You take the payload's opto-electronic boards from bench-grade to space-qualified flight hardware: EEE parts selection, derating, radiation tolerance, and qualification campaigns through thermal-vac and vibration. You may excel here if you've built electronics that survived launch, vacuum, and radiation. Not sure, or a strong generalist? If you move across board design, high-speed work, and flight hardware rather than living in one concentration, that's a seat too. You'll grow into the concentration that fits you best as the electronics team takes shape. Responsibilities • Design, lay out, and bring up electronics across the terminal and payload, owning your boards from schematic through validated hardware • Define electrical interfaces with the optical seats, translating each subsystem's power, drive, and readout needs into schematics and boards • Select, evaluate, and qualify components, balancing performance, availability, and lead time at seed-stage speed • Characterize and debug at the bench, chasing issues across electrical, optical, and software boundaries • Support integration and test as the optical chain and payload come together • Document designs, test results, and bring-up procedures so hardware can be rebuilt and debugged by others Basic Qualifications • Bachelor's or advanced degree in electrical engineering or a related discipline • Board-level design experience across schematic capture and PCB layout • Hands-on bring-up and debug depth with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and lab instrumentation • Analog and mixed-signal circuit fundamentals • Proficiency with a professional EDA tool (Altium Designer, KiCad,