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Salary: USD 190,000 - 285,000 / annual
K2 Space is building the largest and highest-power satellites ever flown, backed by over $1 billion in funding from leading investors including Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and T. Rowe Price. With over $1 billion in signed contracts across commercial and US government customers and plans to scale to 100 satellites per year with multiple launches in 2027, K2 is mass-producing the highest-power satellite platforms ever built for missions from LEO to deep space.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role for a Principal Mixed-Signal Design Engineer focused on data converters. You will lead the architecture and development of wideband, high-performance data converters and associated analog front-ends for advanced mixed-signal SoCs, with significant ownership from architecture and technology tradeoffs through circuit design, integration, and silicon validation.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architect and design high-speed, wideband ADCs and DACs for demanding RF and mixed-signal applications
- Lead converter architecture selection and trade studies, balancing bandwidth, sampling rate, resolution/ENOB, linearity, power, area, and implementation risk
- Design supporting wideband analog front-ends including ADC input networks, track-and-hold/sampling circuits, DAC output stages, references, biasing, clocking, and calibration circuitry
- Develop high-performance circuits in advanced FinFET CMOS technologies and address analog design challenges in deeply scaled nodes
- Own designs from concept and behavioral modeling through transistor-level implementation, layout, verification, and silicon characterization
- Develop calibration and correction techniques for impairments and collaborate with DSP/systems engineers on mixed-signal algorithms
- Define converter specifications and interfaces in collaboration with systems, RF, digital, package, and verification teams
- Drive converter integration into complex mixed-signal SoCs, including power, clocking, signal integrity, and physical implementation
- Help establish data-converter design methodologies, IP, simulation infrastructure, and best practices from the ground up
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to analog and mixed-signal engineers
Qualifications:
- MS or PhD in Electrical Engineering or related field with significant industry experience in high-performance analog/mixed-signal IC design
- Deep expertise designing GHz-class and/or multi-GS/s ADCs and DACs
- Strong understanding of converter architectures such as SAR, pipeline, time-interleaved, flash/folding, current-steering DACs, and hybrid architectures
- Demonstrated ability to translate system requirements into converter architectures and circuit-level specifications
- Strong experience with wideband analog/RF signal paths, sampling circuits, clocking, references, and low-noise/high-linearity circuit design
- Experience designing high-performance analog circuits in FinFET technologies
- Strong understanding of converter impairments including jitter, noise, distortion, mismatch, timing skew, interleaving errors, and calibration
- Experience taking complex analog/mixed-signal ICs from architecture through tapeout and silicon bring-up
- Deep proficiency with industry-standard analog/mixed-signal design, simulation, and verification tools
Preferred qualifications include experience with RF-sampling or direct-RF ADC/DAC architectures, multi-GHz instantaneous bandwidth converters, digitally assisted analog design and calibration, integrating converters into large digital-heavy SoCs, advanced packaging and signal-integrity considerations, and building new methodologies and silicon platforms from the ground up.
Note: This role requires U.S. Person status or eligibility for a federally issued export control license due to ITAR compliance.
