Hardware Design Engineer

Career Area: Engineering

Occupation Group: Electrical, Electronic, and Related Engineering

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Hardware Design Engineer earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $91,693

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $101,506

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Designs and develops computer hardware and computer-related equipment. Designs and validates hardware. May supervise production of hardware components or provide technical assistance with hardware installation.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Hardware Design Engineer is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
• Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.
• Research: Experience performing creative and systematic work to understand a product, market, or customer, either before building a new solution, or to troubleshoot an existing issue
• Troubleshooting: Troubleshooting or dpanneuring is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine or a system.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Simulation: Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.
• Hardware Experience: Experience developing hardware that provides a user-friendly experience, allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in a natural and intuitive way.
• Hardware Design: Experience working in hardware architecture environments and using hardware design models to document how components fit into a system.
• Computer Engineering: Computer engineering is a discipline that integrates several fields of electrical engineering and computer science required to develop computer hardware and software.
• Python: Python is a widely used high-level programming language for general-purpose programming, created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Hardware Design Engineer that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Xilinx: Xilinx, Inc. is an American technology company, primarily a supplier of programmable logic devices. It is known for inventing the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and as the first semiconductor company with a fabless manufacturing model.
• Electronic Circuits: An electronic circuit is composed of individual electronic components, such as resistors, transistors, capacitors, inductors and diodes, connected by conductive wires or traces through which electric current can flow.
• Graphics Processing Units (GPU): Working experience of Graphics Processing Units (GPU). A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles.
• SPICE: Experience working with the SPICE protocol to share desktops and support remote users.
• Allegro:

Salary Boosting Skills

A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:

• Computer Vision: Working experience of Computer Vision, which is an interdisciplinary field that deals with how computers can be made for gaining high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to automate tasks that the human visual system can do. Computer vision tasks include methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Hardware Engineer
• Hardware Design Engineer
• Senior Hardware Engineer
• Digital Design Engineer
• Salesforce Field Service Functional Lead

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• Hardware Engineer
• Integrated Circuit (IC) Design Engineer
• Hardware Test Engineer
• Computer Circuit Design Engineer
• Hardware Project Engineer
• Firmware Engineer