Electrical Engineer - Platform Architecture Systems Prototyping
Other Engineering, IT
Cupertino, CA, USA
USD 184,700-324,800 / year + Equity
Posted on Jul 9, 2026
Apple's Platform Architecture Engineering team builds fully functional prototypes of systems that cut across domains and technologies. We're a small, self-contained group of electrical, mechanical, FPGA, and software engineers who take an idea and make it real. Those range from tools that teams across the company come to depend on, to proofs-of-concept for products and capabilities that inform Apple's roadmap. We're looking for an electrical engineer to own board designs end to end. You'll work closely with our cross-functional team, and often alongside Apple's domain experts. We ideate, prototype, and demo often, then move on quickly once we've learned what we can. No two projects are alike.
At any given time you'll be the electrical engineer on one or more small, focused project teams, independently owning every EE decision and deliverable, with strong teammates around you when you need them. This means taking a board design from architecture to a working prototype: defining the system, capturing schematics, and driving bring-up and debug. The work spans high-speed digital, analog, power, and mixed-signal design, and changes with each project.
- Define the board and system architecture for new prototypes, selecting the right components and technologies for each problem.
- Capture schematics across high-speed digital, analog, power, and mixed-signal designs, and define high-quality electrical constraints on the netlist.
- Independently bring up, debug, and characterize prototypes using lab instrumentation, through to a working system.
- Create and execute test and validation plans, including functional verification and signal characterization.
- Track and resolve hardware issues, and support builds and rework alongside vendors and lab staff.
- Work closely with cross-functional counterparts to bring up the full system.
- Clearly articulate design decisions, justify schedule forecasts, and present data and findings to partners and leadership.
- BS in Electrical Engineering or equivalent engineering degree.
- Experience designing and developing custom PCBs and electronic systems.
- Experience taking board designs through the full cycle: architecture, schematic capture, board bring-up, and debug.
- MS in Electrical Engineering or equivalent engineering degree and 10+ years of relevant work experience.
- Strong fundamentals across the breadth of electrical engineering, with deep, hands-on expertise in one or more core domains (for example, high-speed digital and signal integrity, analog and power, or RF).
- Experience with one or more high-speed interfaces and their design challenges (e.g., PCIe, USB/USB4, Ethernet, HDMI, DDR).
- Experience designing embedded hardware — integrating a processor (SoC or MCU) with power, clocking, and sensors or other peripherals.
- Familiarity with FPGA-based board design and working alongside RTL engineers.
- Able to quickly become proficient in an unfamiliar domain, enough to make sound architectural decisions and design well in them.
- Proven track record of defining and driving loosely scoped work with creative, ambitious approaches to complex problems.
- Skilled with AI tools as a productivity/capability multiplier, balanced by experience-backed intuition and sound judgment about when to rely on them.