Hardware Engineer

Peraton Labs delivers innovative solutions and revolutionary new capabilities to solve the most difficult and complex challenges for government agencies, utilities, and commercial customers. With a distinguished heritage tracing back to Bell Labs, Bellcore, and Telcordia, our experts pave the way. Peraton Labs' cybersecurity research protects mission-critical systems and national cyber infrastructure through a broad range of initiatives in computer network defense, secure-by-design techniques and cyber operations and experimentation platforms.

Our projects span several areas of interest.  Our core competencies include (but are not limited to): 

• Program analysis, including program understanding, vulnerability identification, and remediation 
• Malware analysis and reverse engineering 
• Resilient networking in support of cyber mission goals 
• Software-defined networking for cyber defense and deception 
• Artificial intelligence (reasoning, probabilistic inference, machine learning

In this position, as a Hardware Engineer, you will work as part of a small, focused team to architect, develop, implement, and test modular software applications and tools for emulating cyber-physical systems. Additionally you will:

• Work in a laboratory environment utilizing test equipment (oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, VNAs etc.) to characterize and debug complex electronic systems
• Prepare and execute test events for customers and internal and external stakeholders
• Lead efforts to develop lab-based acquisition and control platforms to aid in test and characterization of hardware systems
• Serve as the hardware team representative on interdisciplinary efforts to contribute knowledge of system architecture and focused processor implementations
• Participate in proposal efforts by providing input on technical path and BOM/cost and schedule estimates
• Rehost unknown or sparsely documented firmware by analyzing binaries, identifying hardware dependencies, and adapting these to run correctly in emulated environments
• Ensure model quality and correctness through unit-level and system-level testing, and by validating behavior against first principles, measured data, documentation, and hardware/software artifacts
• Communicate technical foundations of models and algorithms through reports and briefings

• Minimum of 5 years of experience with BS/BA; 3 years with MS/MA; 0 years with PhD
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or related scientific/engineering discipline
• US Citizenship
• Active Secret Clearance with ability to obtain TS/SCI
• Ability to develop rapid prototype solutions using a combination of COTS and custom designs
• Ability to develop PCB-based designs and implement FPGA and embedded software to support HWIL and surrogate designs
• Ability to integrate processor/microcontroller debuggers to extract binary data and integrate in circuit probing solutions to characterize dynamic program execution
• Experience extending and customizing existing emulation frameworks (e.g., QEMU) in C/C++ and Python to support new targets, peripherals, and capabilities
• Ability to develop emulator tooling and virtual device models to support reverse engineering and analysis of embedded systems across diverse architectures (e.g., ARM, PPC)
• Ability to develop digital models using virtualization tools (e.g., QEMU) and network them together to create integrated, end-to-end system simulations that closely approximate real hardware behavior