Engineering Careers in an Integrated Studio
Review open roles, responsibilities, first-month expectations, qualifications, and our paid working-session hiring process.
Scope of the Work
Sunlab is a small, integrated studio. Hardware, software, AI, and marketing specialists work in the same office and collaborate on shared client programs.
Engineers participate in product positioning and launch decisions, while marketing specialists work directly with technical product information. This reduces handoff errors and keeps product claims consistent with the delivered system.
The work requires planned context switching between focused technical delivery and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We schedule concentrated periods for board bring-up, development, analysis, and other work that requires uninterrupted attention.
Engineers are responsible for production and handover requirements, including test procedures, runbooks, second-source planning, migrations, and technical documentation. These deliverables are included in the project scope and schedule.
Each role requires depth in one discipline, working knowledge of adjacent disciplines, and clear communication about unfamiliar requirements. Team members communicate directly with clients from the start of employment.
These roles are not limited to a narrow set of specialist tasks. They include routine delivery, documentation, client communication, and coordination with other disciplines.
Roles Currently Open
Each posting is a real seat on an existing program rather than a pipeline ad, and 4 of them are open right now. If it’s published, we’re hiring for it, and it comes down the week it’s filled.
Hardware Engineer, PCB and Firmware
You'd own board designs end to end: schematic, layout, bring-up, and the firmware that proves the thing works. We're small, so whoever places the footprints is whoever's on the scope at bring-up, and whoever writes the test procedure the contract manufacturer follows.
Scope in the First Month
- A second-spin revision of an existing design, against written review findings
- A power budget and a ranked risk list for a new product during a scoping week
- First-article bring-up: assembly, probing, bootloader validation, and a written record of every surprise
- Ownership of one subsystem on a live program, usually a radio, a power tree, or a sensing chain
- Design rationale and a functional test procedure, written for transfer to manufacture
Requirements
- At least one board carried from schematic to a working unit, and an honest account of what went wrong on it
- Working proficiency in KiCad or Altium, with layout decisions you can defend
- Embedded C or C++ on production silicon, bare metal or under a real-time operating system
- Close reading of datasheets, errata and application notes included
- Writing down why a design went the way it did, as a habit rather than a favor
Desirable Experience
- Pre-compliance measurement, or time in an EMC chamber
- Enough mechanical CAD to check that a board fits its enclosure
- Things you designed, built, and actually use
Genuinely optional. These strengthen an application and we don’t score them as requirements.
Send us something you finished and two paragraphs about it. The subject line is already filled in.
Full-Stack Product Engineer
You'd build client applications, internal tools, and the platforms that sit between a device and the person reading its output. Everything goes into the client's repository on a branch they can read, so your work is visible the whole way through instead of revealed at the end.
Scope in the First Month
- A working slice of a live client build, reviewed and merged, inside your first two weeks
- Getting a legacy integration nobody has touched in years back to a testable state
- The application layer of a hardware program, against telemetry that arrives late, out of order, or not at all
- A handover session where a client developer deploys your work unassisted
Requirements
- Several years of production TypeScript on both sides of the wire, and a considered view on where the boundary belongs
- SQL you write by hand, and enough schema instinct to price a migration
- Deliberate test coverage, and a reason for whatever you chose to leave untested
- A feature taken from a vague requirement to a deployed result, including the questions that made the requirement precise
- Comfort working inside somebody else's codebase without rewriting it first
Desirable Experience
- Infrastructure as code, and opinions about continuous integration you can back up
- Astro, or comparable server-rendered work where performance was a requirement
- On-call experience, and what it changed about how you build
Genuinely optional. These strengthen an application and we don’t score them as requirements.
Send us something you finished and two paragraphs about it. The subject line is already filled in.
Machine Learning Engineer, Computer Vision
You'd deliver vision systems that run on client footage in field conditions: car parks, sites, and production lines, usually on hardware mounted out in the environment rather than racked in a server room. What decides this job is accuracy in low light, weather, and a fixed thermal and power budget, not a score on a benchmark.
Scope in the First Month
- Retraining and evaluating a detector on client footage, reported as a full confusion matrix rather than one flattering number
- Deploying a model to Jetson-class hardware inside an agreed power and latency budget
- Labeling and evaluation loops the client can keep improving after handover
- The deterministic layer around the model: validation, persistence, and an audit trail for anything it sets off
Requirements
- Production computer vision across training, evaluation, and deployment
- PyTorch, and familiarity with the detector families that hold up in the field
- Enough software engineering to ship the system around the model, not just the notebook
- Healthy suspicion of your own metrics, and a nose for dataset leakage
- Willingness to say plainly when a problem doesn't need a model
Desirable Experience
- Edge inference: quantization, ONNX, TensorRT, or an equivalent runtime
- Production language model systems where correctness is enforced outside the model
- Working with hardware engineers on camera selection and mounting
Genuinely optional. These strengthen an application and we don’t score them as requirements.
Send us something you finished and two paragraphs about it. The subject line is already filled in.
Growth Marketing Lead
You'd run campaigns for technical products and own the numbers underneath them: paid search and social, the analytics, the reviews, and the search visibility of the sites we build. The standard is a page a client's own engineer can read without finding anything to correct.
Scope in the First Month
- Paid campaigns built, launched, and managed against cost per acquisition, in accounts the client owns
- Conversion tracking fixed and a written baseline agreed in week one, before anybody claims a result
- A technical audit of a client site covering crawl health, performance, structured data, and architecture, delivered as ranked fixes
- Interviews with client engineers, turned into pages a buyer can follow without losing the technical substance
Requirements
- Paid search and paid social you have run yourself, with the account you can talk us through
- Analytics literacy: tracking you set up, attribution you can defend, and a report somebody acted on
- Applied technical SEO across crawl budget, rendering, structured data, internal linking, and Core Web Vitals, plus the judgment to say which one is the constraint
- Published work a technical audience took seriously, with three examples
- Enough comfort in a repository to deliver recommendations as pull requests. Markdown and a basic Git workflow are the floor
Desirable Experience
- An engineering, science, or trade background of any kind
- Review generation and reputation work for a business where it mattered
- Responsibility for a site's traffic through a redesign
Genuinely optional. These strengthen an application and we don’t score them as requirements.
Send us something you finished and two paragraphs about it. The subject line is already filled in.
Hiring Process
Four steps, about three weeks end to end, and you know where you stand at the end of each one. Only the first conversation is unpaid.
Submission of Work
Send work, not a cover letter
We read work, not cover letters. Send a repository, a board, a page you published, or something you built on your own time. Two paragraphs on what it was and what you'd do differently now carry more weight than a page describing it. Every application is read by someone who'd be working next to you.
Initial Conversation
About 45 minutes
About forty-five minutes, mostly about the work you sent: what was hard, what you got wrong, and what you'd change. We'll describe the projects the role covers in the same call, including the parts we haven't figured out yet.
Paid Working Session
Paid at contract rate
Half a day or a full day, paid at contract rate, on a real problem from an active project with the client's permission. No unpaid take-homes and no algorithm puzzles. A session worked under normal conditions tells both of us more, and it doesn't tax the people with the least spare time.
Decision Within a Week
A real reason either way
You'll hear inside a week: an offer stating compensation and a start date, or a no stating the actual reason. Either way you keep the payment for the working session.
We won’t ask forunpaid take-home exercisewhiteboard algorithm testportfolio rebuilt for us
You won’t gettemplate rejectionsilencean offer revised after you accept it
Background Reading
The Process and Studio pages provide additional information about project delivery, communication, handover, and our in-house capabilities.
- How we workScoping, milestones, handover, and what we do in the week a schedule moves.
- The studioHow we’re set up, and what everything in-house actually itemizes out to.
A Single Accountable Team
Hardware, software, AI, design, and marketing are delivered by one in-house team. When a requirement falls outside our capabilities, we identify it during scoping and recommend an appropriate specialist.
Production Readiness in Scope
Test procedures, panelization, runbooks, second-source planning, and deployment documentation are included in the scope and schedule when required for production readiness.
Hardware, Software, and Marketing, Plus AI, as One System
Our hardware, software, AI, and marketing teams coordinate system requirements, interfaces, product claims, and launch dependencies within one delivery program.
Open Applications
If nothing on the list above matches, it’s still worth writing. Lead with the work rather than with a description of yourself.
A repository, a board, a page you published, a teardown, or a tool you built because the existing one was bad. Two paragraphs on what it was, what went wrong, and what you’d do differently now carry more weight than a summary of your strengths, and they take less time to write.
You don’t need a cover letter, a resume formatted for a parser, or an email asking whether we’re hiring. The list above is the current answer to that last one. Open applications are kept for six months and read by the person who’d be working next to you. If something opens up that fits, we’ll get in touch before the posting goes live.
One thing you finished, two paragraphs about it, and where you are.
hello@sunlabdigital.comWe read speculative applications against the disciplines we hold in-house: Electrical, Embedded, Mechanical, Software, Data & AI, Growth Marketing. Studio roles that sit outside the four practices count too.
Send Us Something You Built
A board, a repository, a page you published, or something you made on your own time, with two paragraphs on what you'd do differently now. No cover letter needed. Every application is read by someone who'd be working next to you.
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