Hardware Design Review Engineer (power and thermal)
Key Skills
Job Description
Unpaid, open source, a real review. MeshSat is an open-hardware field communications kit (CERN-OHL-S-2.0), still a prototype. The V2 kit is designed, not built: seven boards in a sealed Peli 1450 around three Compute Module 5 slots, a 4S Li-ion pack, a BQ25731 charger and five LM5176 buck-boost stages, with LoRa, VHF, HF, 5G and Iridium radios. It was designed with AI assistance. No hardware engineer has read it yet. We want that read, layer by layer, before any board goes to layout. You get the packets: requirements and operating envelope, the architecture, the power and heat budget with its connected diagram, the circuit-change list, the findings ledger, the KiCad 9 sources and netlists, and the earlier reviews. All public, on GitHub, at a named commit. You hand back written findings per layer: defect, missing evidence or assumption, each with a severity, the smallest fix and the check that closes it. And a go or no-go at each gate. The hard part is layer 4: power and heat inside a sealed case. So you've designed battery-powered field equipment for a while, you know buck-boost and NVDC charging, MOSFET SOA, fuses, eFuses and TVS coordination, thermal design of sealed boxes, EMC to MIL-STD-461 or IEC 61000-4, IPC-2221, and you read datasheets like a sceptic. KiCad helps. A few hours a week, your own pace, remote. Your name in the repo if you want it. Battery safety sign-off and certification aren't part of this; those go to a paid review. Apply with two lines on what you've designed. The design: github.com/meshsat/meshsat-fieldkit
Core Responsibilities
Review the prototype hardware design layer by layer, focusing especially on power and thermal performance inside a sealed enclosure. Document defects, missing evidence, and assumptions with severity, the smallest corrective action, and a verification check, then provide a go/no-go decision at each review gate.
Requirements
Applicants should have substantial experience designing battery-powered field equipment and be knowledgeable about power conversion, charging, component protection, thermal design, EMC, and relevant standards. They should be able to critically assess datasheets; KiCad familiarity is helpful, and applicants should provide two lines about what they have designed.
About MeshSat
Industry: Telecommunications
Company size: 2-10 employees
When a storm, an outage or a disaster takes the network down, the radios people already own mostly cannot help. A Meshtastic LoRa mesh keeps a village talking to itself, but it has no route out of the valley. A satellite modem can reach the far side of the planet, but it costs real money per message and almost nobody carries one. A phone is useless without a tower. MeshSat is the piece in between. It is an open source gateway that takes a message off a local mesh and finds a way out over whatever bearer is still alive: Iridium satellite, cellular SMS, amateur packet radio, ZigBee, Bluetooth or a plain IP link. Eight transport bearers, reachable across nine wired Reticulum interfaces. A routing layer underneath chooses the path by cost, so traffic stays on the free bearers and only reaches for the metered ones when nothing free is left. Satellite bytes are expensive, and that cost is why the routing layer exists at all. It runs as a single Docker container on a Raspberry Pi, in a waterproof case, with no cloud service and no account required. Everything is free software under the GPLv3, and the code, the commit history and the field measurements are all public. An honest note on status: MeshSat is a prototype under active development, not a finished product. It has never been deployed to a real user and has never been used in a real emergency. The repository sets out plainly what has run on hardware and what has not, because anyone considering it for serious use deserves to know that first. From November 2026 the project runs a six month field programme supported by SIDN fonds, putting kits into real conditions with real operators and publishing what happens. Built in Leiden, the Netherlands, by Elli and Kyriakos. Website: meshsat.net Source: https://github.com/meshsat/meshsat MeshSat Hub, the fleet management platform, is open for sign-up at hub.meshsat.net. Accounts are approved by hand and the free plan covers four devices.