Hardware Lead

About ENGIE Energy Access

ENGIE Energy Access is the leading Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) and mini-grids solutions provider in Africa. The company develops innovative, off-grid solar solutions for homes, public services and businesses, enabling customers and distribution partners access to clean, affordable energy. The PAYGO solar home systems are financed through affordable instalments from $0.19 per day and the mini-grids foster economic development by enabling electrical productive use and triggering business opportunities for entrepreneurs in rural communities. With over 1,800 employees, operations in nine countries across Africa (Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), over 1.9 million customers and more than 9 million lives impacted so far, ENGIE Energy Access aims to impact 20 million lives across Africa by 2025.

www.engie-energyaccess.com  

www.linkedin.com/company/engie-africa

Job Purpose/Mission

As part of the ENGIE Energy Access Research and Development team, you passionately work on new, innovative and life-changing high quality products from concept to mass production and beyond. As a Hardware Lead, you take responsibility for our team of 3 electrical engineers ensuring that the team prioritization is maintained at all times and is delivering against the corporate product roadmap. Bringing in your hardware engineering excellence as an individual contributor, you fundamentally drive product development throughout all aspects of the product lifecycle. During concept generation and early product definition you consult the East Africa based Product Management Team on product design and development aspects and translate their product requirements into specifications. Before mass production and during product lifetime, you support the Product Performance Team on product reliability validation activities.

Responsibilities

Team leading:

• Drive the system and hardware development of our next generation solar home systems and support optimization on our existing products.
• Be the technical expert for the team, whilst bringing in domain expertise where necessary • Inform electrical design decisions and system vision for future products.
• Ensure state-of-the-art level of technical outcome and escalate relevant issues to the R&D Team Lead
• Manage priorities and resources across the HW team to ensure project schedules and KPIs are met.
• Set best practices, tools and processes required for electrical engineering and system design.
• Mentor and guide the professional and technical development of the hardware team.
• Work with our Product Performance Team to take the product through validation and NPI stages.

Individual contribution:

• Develop hardware concepts based on provided requirements and specifications with a focus of optimizing hardware costs as well as environmental and life-time requirements.
• Support 3rd-party ODM development projects incl. TRD, RFQ, design review and validation.
• Own collaboration with industrial design contractors.
• Create HW schematics and PCB layouts for analog and digital circuits as well as for the power stage.
• Verify the hardware functionality through simulations, prototyping and testing.
• Work together with firmware engineers to specify firmware requirements and validate systems.
• Actively support the transfer of a prototype solution into mass-production.
• Analyze hardware problems, identify root causes, and provide efficient solutions for our new and existing products including self-developed, codeveloped and externally sourced products, peripheral appliances, and tools.
• Contribute to the requirements engineering of the Product Management and the hardware validation test planning of the Product Performance Team.

Experience and skills

Experience:

• 8-10+ years of experience on technically owning product development as a senior hardware engineer in consumer electronics.
• 1+ years of experience in a team lead role.
• Proven ability on time-efficiently guiding the electrical design process from prototyping to mass production.
• Experience with design and validation of DC power electronics and ideally RF technology or AC electronics.
• Embedded development experience (microcontrollers, SPI, UART, I2C, USB).
• Experience in inspiring and coordinating mechanical case design, working closely with mechanical designers and engineers as well as contractors for thermal, RF and stress testing simulations.
• Proven ability to guide strategic technical decision making and to track and mitigate technical risks.
• Experience in project management and in working with international teams is a plus.

Qualifications:

• MS or greater in Electrical Engineering, Hardware Engineering, or similar discipline.
• Broad knowledge about electronics and electrical components.
• Profound background in low cost and high efficiency circuit design.
• Ability to inspire and motivate people.
• Strong interpersonal communication and excellent documentation skills.
• Self-driven, independent working style.
• Strong team-mindedness and collaborative way of working.
• Ability to analyze problems, identify root causes and provide efficient solutions.
• Innovation-oriented mindset, enthusiasm to research new topics and arrive at tangible results.

Technology:

• Solid understanding of analog and mixed signal design principles.
• Understanding of battery & solar technologies is a plus.
• PCB design (schematics and layout) in Altium or comparable tools.
• Simulations in e.g. Spice.
• Basic skills in C programming; python and git is a plus.

Language(s):

• English – Professional Fluency.
• German is a plus.

ENGIE is an equal opportunity employer, promoting diversity and committed to creating an inclusive environment for all. All applications are screened based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without any regard to origin, age, name, sexual identity, orientation or preference, religion, marital status, health, disability, political opinions, union involvement or citizenship. Our differences are our strengths.