Future Technologies Engineer – Electronics

Job Title: Future Technologies Engineer – Electronics
Location: Shannon, Co. Clare, Ireland
Reports To: CTO
Job Type: Full-Time, Permanent, Onsite

The Opportunity

Ei Electronics is a top three global brand in smoke and carbon monoxide sensing with a growing base of connected products and environmental sensing technology.

We are now asking ourselves what the next generation of life-safety technology will look like and investing deeply in frontier innovation.

At Ei Electronics, we want to explore that question by building, experimenting and turning new ideas into working technology.

We are looking for an ambitious and curious Future Technologies Engineer to join our new Global Innovation Centre in Shannon. This is not a conventional engineering role focused on maintaining existing products or delivering incremental changes. It is an opportunity to work at the very early stages of innovation — exploring technologies, developing prototypes, testing new concepts and helping create new intellectual property that could shape the future of life safety.

You could be investigating a new sensing technology one week, building an electronic prototype the next, and developing embedded software or experimenting with a completely new product concept after that.

Some ideas will develop into future Ei products. Others may prove that a particular technology or approach doesn’t work. Both are part of innovation.

We are looking for someone who enjoys making things, solving difficult problems and finding out whether an idea can actually work.

Key Responsibilities

You will work within Ei’s Innovation Centre on early-stage technologies and concepts, taking ideas from initial investigation through to functional prototypes and proof-of-concept systems.

Your work will include:

• Exploring emerging technologies that could create new opportunities in life safety, sensing and the connected home.
• Turning ideas and concepts into working electronic prototypes.
• Designing and developing analogue and digital electronic circuits.
• Creating schematics and PCB designs for experimental and prototype hardware.
• Developing embedded firmware for microcontroller-based systems.
• Specifying and building application software and end user apps to leverage insights in the home and beyond.
• Experimenting with sensors, wireless technologies, new materials, algorithms and other emerging technologies.
• Building proof-of-concept systems to quickly determine whether an idea is technically viable.
• Designing experiments, analysing results and using what you learn to improve the next iteration.
• Developing new technical concepts and contributing to the creation of new intellectual property and patents.
• Researching technologies outside our traditional product areas and identifying where they could be applied to future life-safety products.
• Working with universities, technology partners and other researchers where specialist knowledge or collaboration can accelerate an idea.
• Demonstrating prototypes and communicating your findings to technical and business teams.
• Helping successful concepts progress from experimentation towards future product development.

Qualifications & Experience

We’re more interested in curiosity, technical ability and ambition than finding someone who has already done exactly this job before.

You should be the kind of engineer who wants to understand how things work, enjoys experimenting and is prepared to build something to test an idea rather than simply discuss whether it might work.

You will ideally have a strong grounding across:

• A degree in Electronic Engineering, Electronic & Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Mechatronics or a related technical discipline.
• A strong understanding of electronics and embedded systems.
• An ability to design, build, test and troubleshoot electronic circuits.
• An interest in embedded software and microcontroller-based development.
• Understanding application software, cloud technologies and app development environments
• A practical, hands-on approach to engineering.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability.
• The confidence to investigate unfamiliar technologies and learn quickly.
• The ability to work independently while collaborating with engineers, researchers and specialists from different disciplines.

Useful Experience

You don’t need to have everything on this list. Experience or an interest in any of the following would be useful:

• Analogue and digital circuit design
• PCB design and Altium
• Embedded C
• Python
• Sensors and sensing technologies
• Wireless and RF technologies
• IoT and connected devices
• Signal processing and data analysis
• Rapid prototyping
• Machine learning or edge AI
• Hardware/software interfacing such as I²C, SPI, UART and CAN
• Electronic test and measurement equipment
• Developing prototypes from an initial idea or concept
• AWS, Azure, GCP
• IoS, Android

We are open to engineers at different stages of their careers.

You may be a recent graduate with excellent technical ability and a portfolio of projects you’ve built yourself, or you may already have several years of industry experience and want the opportunity to move into a more exploratory and innovation-focused environment.

What matters most is that you are technically curious, hands-on, ambitious and excited by the opportunity to create something that doesn’t exist yet.

Why Join Ei’s Innovation Centre?

Ei Electronics develops life-safety technology used in homes around the world. Our Innovation Centre has been established to look beyond today’s products and investigate the technologies and ideas that could define what comes next.

You’ll have access to modern R&D laboratories, engineering equipment and the resources needed to turn ideas into real prototypes.

Most importantly, you’ll have the opportunity to work on problems where the answer isn’t already known.

We offer a competitive salary and bonus scheme, health benefits, professional development opportunities and the opportunity to help create technologies that could ultimately improve and protect people’s lives.