electronics_engineer.init()

Alex Rivera;

I design embedded systems and mixed-signal hardware — from schematic to silicon to shipped product. Based in Austin, TX.

CH1 — SIGNAL.TRACE
01 / About

Background

I'm an electronics engineer with 7 years of experience taking hardware products from a napkin schematic to a certified, manufacturable board. My focus is low-power embedded systems, sensor integration, and power electronics — the layer where firmware meets physics.

I've led PCB layout on 4-to-12 layer boards, brought up custom silicon on new hardware revisions, and debugged signal integrity issues down to the nanosecond. I care about designs that survive contact with the real world: EMI, thermal drift, tolerance stack-up, and the field.

Outside of client work, I build open-source test fixtures and write up post-mortems on hardware failures — because the interesting part is always what broke and why.

EXPERIENCE7 YRS
BOARDS SHIPPED30+
MAX LAYERS ROUTED12L
CERTIFICATIONSFCC / CE
LOCATIONAUSTIN, TX
02 / Projects

Selected work

A few boards and systems I've taken from concept to production.

Power Electronics
GaN Fast-Charge Module

65W USB-PD charger built on a GaN half-bridge topology. Cut thermal footprint 40% versus the silicon reference design while hitting Level VI efficiency.

GaN FET 4-layer PCB USB-PD 3.1
Embedded Systems
Env. Sensor Mesh Node

Battery-powered LoRa sensor node with a 4-year life target. Custom power-gating firmware brought sleep draw down to 1.8µA.

STM32L0 LoRaWAN Ultra-low power
Signal Integrity
12-Layer Server Backplane

High-speed backplane routing 25 Gbps differential pairs across 6 card slots. Owned impedance control, stack-up, and eye-diagram validation.

25G SerDes Impedance control TDR/VNA
Test & Automation
Automated ICT Fixture

Bed-of-nails in-circuit test rig with a Python test harness, cutting per-unit QA time from 12 minutes to 90 seconds on the line.

Python Bed-of-nails CI for hardware
03 / Skills

Datasheet

PCB Design
KiCad, Altium, layer stack-up, DFM/DFA
Embedded FW
C/C++, RTOS, low-power design, bring-up
Power Electronics
SMPS, GaN/SiC, thermal design
Signal Integrity
High-speed routing, TDR, VNA, EMI/EMC
Test & Validation
Python, bench automation, compliance prep
04 / Contact

Connector pinout

Open to full-time roles and select consulting work.