This small, well-established UK company based in Ely, just north of Cambridge designs and builds vacuum-physics based instrumentation, primarily based on mass spectrometers, and particularly time-of-flight mass spectrometers (TOF-MS). They work at the cutting edge of analytical chemistry, facilitating groundbreaking research in a variety of research areas including atmospheric chemistry, medical breath analysis, manufacturing quality control, materials science and high energy physics.
They have an immediate vacancy for a problem-solving electronics engineer or physicist to work across multiple disciplines - designing, developing and delivering TOF-MS instrumentation. Are you an engineer who enjoys the challenge of working from first principles, or a physicist who enjoys hands-on experimental work? Do you enjoy turning your hand to a variety of electronic, physical and mechanical problems? Are you keen to learn new skills, and apply existing knowledge to unfamiliar fields? This could be the perfect job for you!
In addition to technical skills, you should also be capable of writing lucid technical proposals and be able to communicate with clients to gain an understanding of what they hope to achieve. As well as designing and commissioning instruments at their premises, once you have sufficient experience, you will sometimes be asked to set-up and re-create the performance on-site in their clients' laboratories, or undertake service visits to client sites. Their clients are based all around the world, so this will involve some international travel.
Requirements:
Essential
- You will have a good honours degree in electronic engineering, physics, engineering, or a similar discipline with a strong electronics component.
- You have the ability and desire to apply theoretical knowledge to real situations.
- You will have to assimilate new technical information quickly and independently. There will be guidance available from senior technical staff, but you should be capable of teaching yourself from informal sources such as the web or technical manuals.
- You will be capable of debugging analogue/digital circuits at the component level.
- You should be prepared to travel internationally. Typical trips are a few days, but may be as much as two weeks for complex installations. Estimate 4 to 10 trips per year, within the UK and overseas.
- You must have fluent spoken English, including familiarity with English technical language.
- You should be familiar with use of computers for word processing, spreadsheets etc and simple debugging e.g. update of device drivers.
- Being on-site will require a certain degree of self-reliance and calmness under pressure, plus the ability to deal with clients thoughtfully.
Additional advantages
- Experience working on hardware operating under high vacuum.
- Experience writing software, even if only simple batch files or macros
- Basic chemistry