Founding Electrical Engineer
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Role Details
Company: Early-stage AI startup
Industry: AI / Electrical Engineering / Deep Tech
Location: San Francisco, California
Employment Type: Full-time
Work Arrangement: In-office
Salary: $130,000–$200,000
Visa Sponsorship: Limited
Experience: 5–10 years
Company Size: 1–10 employees
About the Company
An early-stage AI startup developing an engineering assessment platform for deep-tech companies. The platform evaluates engineers through realistic technical tasks, helping organisations identify the right candidates for specific roles and match engineers to projects.
The company works with businesses across space and defence, advanced manufacturing, robotics, and related technical industries. Its product is already in production, with established customers and recently secured pre-seed funding.
About the Role
The company is hiring a Founding Electrical Engineer to build and maintain the quality of its electrical engineering assessments. This is a hands-on role combining technical expertise, assessment design, customer collaboration, and AI evaluation.
The successful candidate will develop realistic engineering questions, review existing assessments, translate customer requirements into evaluation criteria, and collaborate with machine learning engineers to improve automated scoring.
This is a founding-level individual contributor position, not an advisory or people-management role. The scope will evolve as the company grows.
Responsibilities
Build and expand the electrical engineering assessment library across avionics, power engineering, circuit design, embedded interfaces, and selected firmware topics.
Review and edit assessments to ensure technical accuracy, realism, clarity, and meaningful evaluation of engineering ability.
Develop new assessment tasks based on client requirements and gaps in the existing question library.
Work with engineering directors and technical teams to understand real-world workflows and translate them into assessment criteria.
Support customer onboarding by mapping technical requirements to relevant assessments.
Collaborate with machine learning engineers to train and improve AI-based scoring systems.
Validate automated assessment scores against expert engineering judgment.
Establish consistent, scalable standards for evaluating electrical engineering work.
Requirements
5–10 years of electrical engineering experience, ideally at senior or staff level.
Strong technical background in a deep-tech environment, such as space and defence, advanced manufacturing, or robotics.
Previous experience interviewing engineering candidates.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Professional proficiency with Altium Designer, KiCad, or equivalent electronic design automation (ECAD) tools.
Familiarity with PCB design workflows and circuit simulation tools.
Ability to translate engineering expertise into clear, consistent assessment criteria.
Experience taking designs through prototyping, testing, and build.
Interview Process
Technical interview
Take-home assignment
Final round
Offer
🌍 Remote from anywhere in the globe
Workplace, Culture & Diversity
Corporate culture is essential to allow the organization to differentiate itself. In terms of image on the one hand, it has strengths both internally and externally to consumers. It is indeed a source of cohesion and motivation of employees and it limits conflicts. With customers, it conveys a positive image and can develop a feeling of closeness to the company or even become a criterion of choice.
About Fractal Talent
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