Analog Electronics Engineer - IMU Navigation Systems

About the role

Destinus develops Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for the defense industry and is looking for an Analog Electronics Engineer in Katwijk aan Zee. You will design the electronics of a proprietary Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) aimed at navigation-grade performance, working at the limits of analog design with ultra-low-noise circuitry that extracts signals measured in nanoamperes.

Key responsibilities

• Design, simulate and develop ultra-low-noise analog front-end electronics, including charge-sensitive and transimpedance amplifiers for capacitive sensing.
• Create PCB architectures focused on shielding, isolation, impedance control and parasitic capacitance suppression.
• Eliminate capacitive crosstalk between high-voltage drive circuits and sensitive sensing channels using active guard rings and advanced grounding.
• Select, integrate and validate high-resolution ADCs and high-speed DACs for precision measurement systems.
• Design clock generation and distribution architectures with very low drift, jitter and phase noise.
• Work with mechanical, sensor and FPGA engineers to optimise system-level performance.
• Build, test, debug and characterise prototypes with oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers and signal generators, and analyse noise sources to improve designs.

Required profile

• Bachelor's, Master's or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Physics or a related field, with a strong focus on precision instrumentation and low-noise electronics.
• At least 5 years of experience designing ultra-low-noise, low-signal-level analog electronics.
• Strong understanding of thermal EMF management, leakage currents, grounding, shielding and precision measurement systems.
• Experience debugging and validating hardware in the lab.

Required skills

• Multi-layer PCB design and layout, with impedance control and shielding.
• Precision op-amps, instrumentation amplifiers, low-noise regulators and high-performance data converters.
• SPICE-based simulation and analog circuit modeling.
• Nice to have: MEMS, inertial or atomic clock electronics; aerospace or defense systems; SPI and parallel bus interfaces; FPGA and microcontroller integration.