About the Role
At Arc , we are on a mission to amplify employees at local businesses using AI. With years of experience building and scaling commerce tools for businesses—from farmers markets and neighborhood coffee shops to global retailers, restaurant chains, and major sports venues—we know how to deliver mission-critical technology that integrates easily, delights customers, and works every time.
Voice drive-thru is our first product on that journey: an AI voice agent that takes real orders at the drive-thru speaker, in real time, integrating directly with a business's existing POS and hardware. Every order runs through a physical device we build and maintain ourselves — a microcontroller wired into the lane's audio and vehicle-detection hardware, paired with an edge compute node that streams audio to and from our backend. Done well, this means more revenue, faster lines, and fewer mistakes for the operators we serve — and it means the hardware underneath it has to work every single time, with no one around to reboot it.
As our Senior Electrical Engineer, you'll own the electrical design of that device and the hardware generations that follow it: the mixed-signal board at the heart of it, the analog audio path that captures a customer's order and plays back the agent's reply, the bypass circuitry that keeps a lane running when everything else fails, and the power and protection design that lets the whole thing sit unattended in a commercial kitchen. This is a high-leverage, high-autonomy role for someone who wants to shape how a physical product behaves in the real world, not just execute tickets.
What You'll Do
• Own the mixed-signal board schematic and system-level electrical design across product generations, from block diagram through prototype, validation, and production builds
• Lead schematic and cross-functional design reviews with our contract manufacturer, and own the DFM, DFT, and component-lifecycle feedback loop
• Run hardware bring-up and debug across the hardware/software boundary, characterizing analog and audio performance on the bench and against the real drive-thru hardware it connects to
• Own compatibility validation across the range of drive-thru base stations and lane hardware our product integrates with, confirming the device drops into a live lane cleanly and works seamlessly with equipment already in the field
• Partner closely with embedded software, product, and operations to turn the on-the-ground constraints of drive-thru lanes and legacy hardware into robust electrical solutions
What We're Looking For
• 6+ years of electrical design experience, with a track record of taking mixed-signal boards from schematic through volume production, prototyping, or early-stage hardware development
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Demonstrated expertise designing and debugging mixed-signal boards that combine a sensitive analog path with digital compute and higher-power output stages on shared copper
• Proficiency with analog audio front-end design and digital audio interfaces
• Fluency creating and interpreting schematics, driving PCB layout, and running hardware bring-up and debug at the bench and in the field
• Experience collaborating across engineering disciplines and with external partners, including contract manufacturers and component vendors
• Bonus: experience with commercial-AV audio systems, acoustic echo cancellation hardware, regulatory certification for DC-powered commercial products, or RF and antenna integration