Electrical Engineer - Low-Noise Optical Sensing

Location:

C-CAMP, Bangalore (on site)

Contract:

Fixed term, one to two months

Start:

As soon as possible

Compensation:

Agreed based on deliverables/ milestones

About Mass Balance

Mass Balance is a London-headquartered deep-tech space biology company with R&D; in Bengaluru. We use the microgravity environment of orbit to study proteins that resist conventional structural biology.

We have completed our first mission, a hardware and systems validation flight. We are now building the hardware for Mission 2.

The Role

We are hiring a hands-on electrical engineer to work with our UK team on a short contract to tune the analog front end of a compact optical sensor for our platform. You will bring up the signal chain, optimise it against real biological samples, and turn the final design into a board.

This is bench work in a small team: quick loops of change, measure and change again, on dev boards and hand-soldered builds rather than a finished PCB. You will be based at our lab space at C-CAMP in Bangalore, working alongside our biology team and coordinating with our engineering and hardware team in the UK.

What You Will Do

- Bring up a low-noise signal chain: light source driver, photodetector amplifiers, high-resolution ADC and microcontroller.
- Optimise gain, bandwidth, noise and stability against real biological samples.
- Implement modulation and synchronous (lock-in) detection.
- Characterise noise floor, drift and background, and explain results in plain language to biologists.
- Document each iteration and translate the final design into a schematic, PCB layout and test report.

What We Are Looking For





Essential

- Strong analog design for very low-level photodetector signals: TIAs, op-amp selection, noise analysis, stability and compensation.
- Circuit and board design: schematic capture and PCB layout in KiCad, Altium or similar, with sound component selection and design for manufacture.
- Mixed-signal layout practice: grounding, shielding, guarding and low-noise power supply filtering.
- Hands-on speed: SMD hand-soldering, board rework and bench debugging within hours, not weeks.
- Experience with lock-in or synchronous detection, and with delta-sigma ADCs.
- Bench skills with oscilloscope, low-noise power supplies and a picoammeter or source-measure unit.
- Required hardware and embedded firmware to run the ADC and modulation (initial control via Raspberry Pi is fine).
- Comfortable working with non-engineers and explaining trade-offs simply.

Nice to have

- Fluorescence, spectroscopy or biosensor instrument experience.
- Small, power-limited or space-constrained instruments.
- Sourcing components and PCB fabrication on short lead times.

The Details

- Contract:

Fixed term of one to two months.
- Location:

C-CAMP, Bangalore, on site.
- Start date:

As soon as possible.
- Compensation:

Based on deliverables rather than time. We pay above industrial average for the right person and are happy to discuss.

How to Apply

If this sounds like your kind of problem, reach out to us at [email protected]. Answer the brief questions below and attach a comprehensive CV.

- What is your earliest possible start date?
- Describe your hands-on experience with low-noise analogue, optical sensing or board design work.

📌 Electrical Engineer - Low-Noise Optical Sensing (Contract) (Bengaluru)
🏢 Mass Balance
📍 Bengaluru