Timebeat
Senior Electronic Engineer
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The short version
You will own electronics from a blank schematic to a product in a customer's rack. Concept, schematic capture, PCB layout, bring-up, debug, validation, and the handover into volume production. Not one block of one board on one programme. The whole thing, then the next one.
That level of ownership is difficult to find. In most companies it is spread across four people in three time zones and takes two years to see a board ship. Here you will design something in the spring and watch it go into a trading floor, a defence programme or a national lab before the end of the year.
About Timebeat
We build precision time synchronisation hardware and software. Our Open TimeCard, Open Time Appliance and TimeBeat Agent deliver nanosecond accuracy to UTC, anti-jam and anti-spoof GNSS, rubidium and OCXO holdover, and independent proof that the time you are running on is the time you think you are running on.
Our customers are stock exchanges, trading firms, telecoms operators, broadcasters, defence primes and government programmes. Our hardware is open: open source, open schematics, open firmware, aligned with the Open Compute Project's Time Appliance Project. When you design a board here, the design goes out into the world with your work visible in it, not buried under an NDA forever.
Why this role matters
We will be straight with you. The band on this role is below what a senior electronics engineer can command at a large defence prime or a semiconductor company. We are a small company growing fast and we are honest about where we are. So here is what you get instead.
- Precision, navigation and timing is about to become critical infrastructure everywhere.
- GNSS is jammed and spoofed daily. Regulators in finance now mandate provable timestamp accuracy. 5G, defence networks, quantum sensing and AI training clusters all need a coherent, verifiable clock, and almost nobody has solved it properly. The market for what we build is expanding into defence, finance, quantum and AI at the same time. You would be joining at the point where a niche becomes infrastructure.
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Multi band GNSS front ends. Rubidium and OCXO oscillator discipline. Low phase noise clock distribution from 1 Hz to 1 GHz. LVDS, SyncE, IEEE 1588 transparent clocks, PCIe, signal integrity that actually matters because a stray picosecond is a customer's compliance failure. If you like problems where the layout decision is the product decision, this is that job.
You will not be a cog
- Direct access to the CTO, no product manager relay race, no six week change control cycle to move a component. You bring a proposal, we discuss it, you build it. Decisions land in days.
Genuine growth trajectory
- We are hiring ahead of a step change in the business. The person who owns the hardware platform now is the person who leads the hardware team as it grows.
What you will do
- Take products from concept through to volume production: requirements, architecture, schematic capture, PCB layout, prototype bring-up, validation, EMC and compliance, design for manufacture, and production handover.
- Design mixed signal boards combining high speed digital, RF and GNSS front ends, precision clocking and power.
- Own signal and power integrity on designs where timing error budgets are measured in nanoseconds and picoseconds.
- Bring up your own boards. Scope, spectrum analyser, logic analyser, phase noise and Allan deviation measurement, and the patience to find the one via that is wrong.
- Work directly with firmware and software engineers so the board and the stack are designed together rather than thrown over a wall.
- Own the BOM: component selection, second sourcing, obsolescence, and the supply chain realities that decide whether a design can actually ship.
- Work with our contract manufacturers on test fixtures, yield, and end of line test.
- Contribute to the open hardware designs we publish, and to customer facing technical material where it helps.
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What we are looking for
- Several years designing production electronics end to end, with boards you can point to that shipped.
- Strong schematic capture and PCB layout skills in a professional tool chain (Altium, KiCad, Cadence or similar).
- Solid grounding in high speed digital design, signal integrity, controlled impedance and power distribution.
- Hands on laboratory bring-up and debug ability. You are comfortable being the person who finds the fault.
- Mixed signal experience: analogue, power and digital on the same board without any of them ruining the others.
- Design for manufacture and test, and experience getting a design through a contract manufacturer.
- Able to work in our London office. This is hardware, so bench time is not optional.
- Precision timing, frequency control, oscillators, PLLs or clock distribution.
- GNSS receivers, RF front ends or antenna systems.
- FPGA integration, PCIe, Ethernet PHYs, SFP or SyncE.
- EMC, environmental and safety compliance for commercial or defence products.
- Embedded Linux platforms, or firmware literacy sufficient to debug across the hardware and software boundary.
- Open source hardware contribution.
- Eligibility for UK security clearance, or willingness to go through it.
What matters to us more than the CV
- You finish things. A beautiful design that never reached production is not a result.
- You are honest about what you do not know, and fast at closing the gap.
- You care about the measurement, not the marketing number.
- You want ownership, and you understand that ownership includes the 2am board fault before a customer ship date.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
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