Opengear keeps networks running smoothly with our Network Resilience Platform. Leveraging our Smart Out of Band solution and automation capabilities, users gain unparalleled presence and proximity to devices. By providing an independent management plane, the Network Resilience Platform ensures secure remote access, enabling connectivity from anywhere. This allows for the effortless deployment, management, and remediation of networks—on the First Day, Worst Day, and Every Day. It's why over 75% of Fortune 500 companies trust us for their networks, whether on- or off-premises or in the cloud. Opengear is a global company with offices in Brisbane, Australia and Sandy, Utah.
At the core of our solution offering are fully custom hardware appliances — chip-down SoC PCB designs tightly integrated with custom enclosures and thermal systems, paired with secure, reliable and feature-rich platform firmware. These are not commodity IT products: our appliances are engineered to industrial-grade reliability standards for an IT sector that cannot afford downtime. The Brisbane hardware team is responsible for this entire platform — and the quality, longevity and dependability of everything Opengear ships rests on the work this team does.
This position is located in Brisbane, Australia.
Position
We are looking for a motivated early-career Electrical Engineer to join our Brisbane hardware team. This is a hands-on, learn-by-doing role where you will work closely with experienced Senior and Principal Engineers to contribute to the design, layout, bring-up and testing of electronic sub-systems used in our next-generation network appliances.
What We Offer (Paragraph/Overview)
You will be guided and mentored throughout, but we expect genuine curiosity, a willingness to ask questions, and the initiative to dig in and understand what you are working on. If you want to grow into a well-rounded hardware engineer working on serious embedded systems, this is the place to do it.
The hardware team prides itself on quality and technology innovation, with a strong focus on continuous improvement. We are customer experience focused — we consider everyone who interacts with our appliances, physically or remotely, a customer of our team. That includes the people who build them, test them and deploy them, as well as our colleagues in firmware, software and operations. How we design things, document them and hand them over matters as much as the design itself.
What You Will Do
Sub-system Design
- Contribute to block diagram, schematic capture and component selection for electronic sub-systems under guidance from Senior and Principal Engineers
- Take on real PCB layout responsibility from day one — working across your own designs and colleagues’ within our Altium Designer environment, with close mentorship from experienced Senior and Principal Engineers
- Work within our MCAD/ECAD co-design workflow, making connector placement and keepout decisions informed by mechanical CAD constraints
- Participate in design reviews, contributing observations and learning from team feedback
Bring-up, Testing and Debugging
- Be a hands-on member of the lab team during PCB bring-up, sub-system validation and functional testing
- Debug hardware issues using bench instruments including oscilloscopes, logic analysers, bench multimeters and programmable power supplies
- Work across common embedded interfaces (SPI, I2C, UART) to verify signal integrity and functional behaviour
- Contribute to test plans and document test results clearly and accurately
Continuous Improvement and Innovation
- Actively participate in team continuous improvement activities — contributing ideas, engaging in retrospectives, and taking on improvement tasks as your skills develop
- Opportunities to lead end-to-end on custom PCBA designs for internal improvement projects — including schematic design, PCB layout, component selection, microcontroller programming and test system integration. Examples include custom electronics to support the systems test engineer (e.g. automated interface test boards, sensor arrays) or thermal emulator boards to support mechanical engineers prototyping and validating thermal solutions. Active support and guidance from senior team members is provided throughout
- Provide electrical engineering advice and design support to colleagues in mechanical, test and firmware disciplines where a hardware perspective adds value
- Bring the same care and engineering rigour to internal tooling and improvement work as to customer-facing product design
Lab and Team Contribution
- Participate in product lifecycle management (PLM) workflows including reviewing and responding to change requests and Engineering Change Orders (ECOs)
- Maintain good engineering documentation habits — schematics, test results, bring-up notes
- Engage actively with firmware and mechanical team members to understand system-level context
Who You Are and What You Bring
- Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, or a closely related discipline
- Foundational understanding of analogue and digital circuit design — including power supply topologies, decoupling strategies, logic interfaces and signal conditioning
- Familiarity with core embedded serial interfaces: SPI, I2C, UART — at a hardware and conceptual level
- Basic working knowledge of Linux — comfortable operating at the command line
- Experience with programming or scripting (Python preferred) sufficient to read, modify and run test scripts — experience gained within university coursework is welcome
- Comfortable using standard bench instruments: oscilloscope, logic analyser, DMM
- Strong attention to detail and a methodical approach to debugging
Desired But Not Required
We will help you grow in these areas — they are not gates:
- Experience with Altium Designer or similar EDA tooling
- Familiarity with additional embedded interfaces: USB, RS-232, Ethernet — at a hardware and protocol level
- Working knowledge of networking fundamentals
- Exposure to lab soldering, rework and PCB assembly
- Familiarity with Design for Test (DFT) and Design for Manufacture (DFM) concepts
- Understanding of interface qualification and signal integrity considerations for multi-layer PCBs
- Familiarity with version control and engineering tooling — e.g. Git or similar VCS, revision control in CAD environments, work item tracking (such as Jira), and basic project management practices including requirements capture, risk tracking and the distinction between verification and validation
Seniority Guide
- We are open to hiring at either Engineer I or Engineer II level depending on the candidate. Level II candidates will typically bring 2–4 years of relevant industry or research experience and will be expected to work with less oversight on assigned sub-systems.
- Opengear is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds.
Candidates must have valid work rights in Australia — we are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position.
Opengear by Digi offers a distinctive Total Rewards package including a short-term incentive program, new hire stock award, and hybrid work environment.
At Digi, we embrace diversity and inclusion among our teammates. It is critical to our success as a global company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. We are committed to providing an environment of respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and teammates.
