Your job is to build the machine that hunts down our hardware's weaknesses and gets that data in front of the people who can fix them. You're the hands-on end of it: test plans, fixtures, automation—and when the machine catches something, you chase it to root cause.

About Specter

Specter’s mission is to help customers automate the physical world.

The Role

Given a product and its requirements, you build the test plan, build the fixture, run the campaign, and script it so the next run is faster. When a unit fails—on the bench, in a chamber, or in the field—you own it across mechanical, electrical, and firmware boundaries until it's understood and fixed.

Concretely, here are some of the things you'll work on in the first few months:

- Plan and run campaigns — Turn product requirements into concrete test plans, then execute: set up fixtures, run chambers, stress hardware to its limits, collect the data, write the report.

- Automate — Script thermal, shock, and vibration campaigns in Python against instruments and fixtures so every run is reproducible.

- Root cause analysis — Chase failures to ground: tear down failed units, isolate the cause across hardware, firmware, and mechanical, and verify the fix. What you find inside reshapes the tests.

- Accelerated life testing — Run ALT and HALT to compress years of field wear into weeks, find the design margins, and feed end-of-life data back to the design team.

- Support EVT / DVT / PVT builds — Validation bring-up during NPI, plus reliability and abuse testing—thermal cycling, vibration, ingress, drops and mishandling, long-duration burn-in.

This is an early-stage team—your fingerprints will be on every fixture, script, and test report we have.

Skills and Experience

- 2+ years of hardware validation or test — Reliability, qualification, or systems test for embedded hardware products.

- Bench skills — Fluent with oscilloscopes, multimeters, logic analyzers, and power analyzers for bring-up and debug; thermal chambers and shakers are familiar territory too.

- Fixture hands — You've built or modified test fixtures and harnesses to get a unit connected, stressed, and measured.

- Reliability and stress testing — You've run mechanical, thermal, environmental, and abuse tests and can interpret what the results mean for the design.

- Structured root cause — You debug methodically across hardware, firmware, and system boundaries—teardowns included—and you don't declare victory on a hunch.

- Python and Linux — You drive instruments, sequence test runs, and make campaigns reproducible end to end—from a shell. Our products and rigs all run Linux; SSH and logs are home turf.

- Data rigor — You treat test data statistically: distributions, margins, trends across campaigns.

- Cross-functional by default — You work daily with EE, firmware, mechanical, and manufacturing without needing a process to make it happen.

Bonus Skills

- Production test systems — End-of-line stations, pogo-pin fixtures, or test that runs at production rate.

- EMC exposure — Pre-compliance testing or supporting formal certification.

- Manufacturing test — Production-line test experience or the validation-to-manufacturing handoff.