Electronics Engineer CV Examples & Writing Guide
An electronics engineer CV gets an interview when it shows products you shipped, not modules you took: what the board did, the tools you designed it in, the standards it had to pass, and the numbers (board spins, yield, BOM cost, EMC results). Below is a full sample CV, then personal statements, project bullets, skills and a graduate version.
Electronics engineer CV example (hardware and PCB design)
This sample is a mid-level electronics engineer with nine years designing mixed-signal boards for industrial and medical products, from schematic through EMC testing and production release. The name and employers are made up. Copy the shape, then swap in your own products, tools and standards.
Devin Okonkwo
Electronics Engineer (Hardware / PCB Design)
Cambridge · 07700 900158 · devin.okonkwo@email.com · github.com/dokonkwo · linkedin.com/in/devinokonkwo
Summary
Electronics engineer with 9 years designing mixed-signal boards for industrial sensing and Class IIa medical devices. Owns designs from requirements through schematic, layout review, bring-up, EMC and production release, most recently a 10-layer board with a 32-bit MCU, isolated analogue front end and 24-bit ADC. Shipped 6 products, 4 of them with two board spins or fewer. Altium, LTspice, MATLAB and C for bring-up firmware.
Experience
Electronics Engineer · Industrial sensing product company, 300 employees, Cambridge
Mar 2022 - Present
- Own hardware for a 4-channel isolated sensor interface: 10-layer board, 32-bit Cortex-M MCU, 24-bit delta-sigma ADC, isolated RS-485 and 24V industrial supply, now shipping about 9,000 units a year.
- Took the last two products from schematic to production release in two board spins each, against a department average of four, by running a full DFM and signal-integrity review before the first fab order.
- Cut BOM cost on the flagship board by 18% (about £9 a unit) through part consolidation, a second-source strategy across 22 line items and moving from a 4-channel to a 2-channel isolator where the channel count was not needed.
- Ran pre-compliance EMC on a bench set-up and took three products through a UKAS-accredited test lab; all three passed radiated emissions on the first visit after adding a common-mode choke and reworking the return path under the switcher.
- Wrote the bring-up firmware in C for board validation and the test scripts in Python used by production, cutting functional test time per unit from 90 to 38 seconds.
Hardware Design Engineer · Contract design house, medical and consumer clients
Jul 2019 - Feb 2022
- Designed 9 boards for 5 clients, including a battery-powered wearable with a BLE module and a Class IIa diagnostic instrument built under ISO 13485 design controls.
- Produced schematics and layout packages in Altium Designer, including impedance-controlled stack-ups and a 6-layer HDI board with 0.4 mm pitch BGA.
- Ran worst-case circuit analysis and LTspice simulations on power and analogue stages, and wrote the verification protocols that fed the client's design history file.
- Debugged bring-up issues with oscilloscope, spectrum analyser and thermal camera; found a ground bounce problem that had blocked a client's release for six weeks.
Graduate Electronics Engineer · Power supply and motor drive manufacturer, Hampshire
Jun 2017 - Jun 2019
- Supported design and test of AC-DC supplies from 60W to 750W, including magnetics selection and thermal derating measurements.
- Built and ran a 20-unit qualification test campaign covering surge, ESD and thermal cycling, and wrote the reports that closed out IEC safety and EMC test items for UKCA and CE marking.
- Redrew 14 legacy schematics into the current CAD library and cleaned up part numbering, cutting purchasing errors on service orders.
- Wrote LabVIEW test sequences that automated efficiency and ripple measurement across load points.
Education
BEng (Hons) Electronic and Electrical Engineering (IET-accredited), 2:1
University, Southampton, 2017
Certifications
- Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (MIET), working towards CEng
- IPC Certified Interconnect Designer (CID)
Skills
What a hardware manager checks first
Hardware is expensive to get wrong: a bad spin costs weeks and thousands of pounds. Four things tell a hiring manager whether you will cost them spins.
- Products that shipped. Not "designed circuits", but a product that went to production, how many units, and what your part of it was. A candidate who has taken a board through fab, bring-up, EMC and release once is worth more than one who has done ten schematics that never left the lab.
- The stack you actually work in. CAD tool, simulator, MCU family, interfaces, and whether you do layout yourself or hand it to a designer. Say it plainly; "proficient in industry-standard tools" reads as a bluff.
- Standards and compliance. CISPR 32 and IEC 61000 for emissions and immunity, IEC 62368-1 for safety, IEC 60601 for medical, ISO 26262 for automotive, UKCA and CE marking, plus RoHS and REACH (and FCC Part 15 or UL if you export to North America). Name the ones your products faced and whether they passed first time.
- Debug ability. The interview is going to be a debug story. Put one in the CV: the ground bounce that killed a client release, the intermittent brownout on cold start, the EMI failure at 180 MHz you traced to a return path.
“Tell me what shipped and how many spins it took. I can teach a tool, I cannot teach someone to be careful before the fab order. And put one debug story on the page, because that is the whole interview anyway and it saves us both a screening call.”
Electronics engineer personal statement and career objective examples
Three or four lines: years, the domain, what you own end to end, the biggest technical detail, and one number. Career objectives are for new graduates and apprentices, not for anyone with shipped products.
Electronics engineer with 9 years designing mixed-signal boards for industrial sensing and Class IIa medical devices, owning designs from requirements through EMC and production release. Latest board: 10 layers, 32-bit MCU, isolated analogue front end, 24-bit ADC. Shipped 6 products, 4 in two spins or fewer, and cut BOM cost on the flagship by 18%.
PCB design engineer with 9 years laying out high-speed and dense boards in Altium and Cadence Allegro: 16-layer stack-ups, DDR4 routing to timing budget, 0.4 mm pitch BGA fanout and impedance-controlled differential pairs. Works with contract manufacturers on DFM and has released 40-plus boards to fab. IPC CID+ certified.
Power electronics engineer with 6 years on AC-DC and DC-DC converters from 30W to 3kW. Designs magnetics, selects topologies, runs thermal and efficiency characterisation, and closes out IEC and UL safety and EMC test items. Lifted efficiency on a 750W supply from 89% to 93.5% at half load through a synchronous rectification redesign.
Electronics engineer with 5 years split between board design and firmware. Designs the board, writes the bring-up and driver code in C, and automates production test in Python. Took a battery-powered BLE product from concept to 40,000 shipped units and extended run time from 9 to 16 months through supply redesign and duty-cycle work.
Electronic and electrical engineering graduate (MEng, 2026, IET-accredited, 2:1) seeking a graduate electronics engineer role in hardware design. Designed and built a 4-layer motor controller in KiCad as a final-year project, including layout, assembly and bring-up, and completed a 6-month placement supporting EMC pre-compliance testing. Comfortable in Altium, LTspice, C and Python.
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Electronics engineer bullets: weak vs. strong
Hardware CVs fail in a predictable way: they describe circuit blocks instead of products and decisions. Fix that and a mid-level engineer reads as senior.
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| Designed PCBs for various products. | Own hardware for a 4-channel isolated sensor interface: 10-layer board, Cortex-M MCU, 24-bit delta-sigma ADC and isolated RS-485, shipping about 9,000 units a year. |
| Worked on schematic capture and layout. | Produced schematic and layout packages in Altium including impedance-controlled stack-ups and a 6-layer HDI board with 0.4 mm pitch BGA fanout. |
| Reduced product cost. | Cut BOM cost on the flagship board by 18% (about £9 a unit) through part consolidation and second sourcing across 22 line items. |
| Performed EMC testing. | Ran bench pre-compliance and took three products to an accredited lab; all three passed radiated emissions first visit after adding a common-mode choke and fixing the return path under the switcher. |
| Reduced design iterations. | Released the last two products in two board spins each against a department average of four, by running full DFM and signal-integrity reviews before the first fab order. |
| Wrote firmware for testing. | Wrote bring-up firmware in C and Python production test scripts, cutting functional test time per unit from 90 to 38 seconds. |
| Troubleshot hardware issues. | Traced a ground bounce problem with an oscilloscope and current probe that had blocked a client release for six weeks, and fixed it with a plane split and decoupling change. |
| Supported qualification testing. | Built and ran a 20-unit qualification campaign covering surge, ESD and thermal cycling, and wrote the reports that closed out IEC safety and EMC test items for UKCA and CE marking. |
| Simulated circuits. | Ran LTspice and worst-case analysis on power and analogue stages and wrote the verification protocols that fed a client's design history file. |
Numbers that carry weight: units shipped, board spins to release, first-pass EMC results, BOM cost per unit, yield and RMA rate, efficiency, current draw and battery life, test time per unit, layer count and pitch, schedule held or recovered.
Skills and tools to put on an electronics engineer CV
Split this into design, tools and lab. Recruiters search on the tool names, hiring managers read the design list.
Design:
- Analogue, digital and mixed-signal circuit design
- Power conversion: buck, boost, flyback, LDO, isolation, magnetics, thermal derating
- High-speed design: length matching, impedance control, differential pairs, DDR and SerDes if you have done it
- Signal and power integrity, grounding, return paths, decoupling strategy
- EMC and ESD design, filtering, shielding, pre-compliance
- Microcontroller and interface design: SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, RS-485, USB, Ethernet
- RF basics: antenna placement, matching networks, module integration
- DFM, DFT, test point strategy, tolerance and worst-case analysis, second sourcing
Tools:
- CAD: Altium Designer, Cadence OrCAD and Allegro, KiCad, Mentor Xpedition
- Simulation: LTspice, PSpice, MATLAB and Simulink, Ansys or Sigrity if you use them
- Code: C and C++ for bring-up and drivers, Python for test automation, LabVIEW
- Version control and PLM: Git, Altium 365, Arena or Windchill
- Mechanical interfaces: STEP export, working with a mechanical engineer on enclosure and connector placement
Lab and standards:
- Oscilloscope, logic analyser, spectrum analyser, VNA, network and power analysers, thermal camera, ESD gun
- CISPR 32 and the IEC 61000 series, UKCA and CE marking (FCC Part 15 for US export)
- Safety: IEC 62368-1, IEC 60601-1 for medical, UL where you export to North America
- Design control and design history files, ISO 13485 and the UK Medical Devices Regulations where medical
- IPC-2221 and IPC-7351 design practice, RoHS and REACH
Entry-level electronics engineer CV (new graduate or apprentice)
Search data for this job is full of "graduate" and "no experience" queries, and the fix is the same everywhere: replace modules with things you built. A graduate who shows one board they designed, ordered, assembled and debugged beats a First with no hardware.
- 1Put a Projects section directly under the personal statement, above education. Two or three projects, each with what it does, the tools, the hard part and the outcome.
- 2For each project, say whether you took it all the way: schematic, layout, fab order, assembly, bring-up, test. Say what did not work first time and how you fixed it. That paragraph is what gets you the interview.
- 3Put placements, a year in industry and internships in the experience section with real duties and numbers, not under education.
- 4List the tools honestly by level: what you have designed in, what you have only used in a module.
- 5Add your GitHub if there is real content on it: KiCad project files, bring-up code, test scripts. An empty link is worse than none.
- 6If your degree is not from the UK, state the accreditation and the UK equivalent, and check your right to work and whether the employer offers visa sponsorship before you apply.
Designed a 4-layer brushless motor controller in KiCad: gate drivers, current sense, Cortex-M0 MCU and CAN interface. Ordered fab and stencil, hand assembled two boards under a microscope, and debugged a gate driver shoot-through with a current probe. Second revision ran a 200W motor continuously for 8 hours at 62 degrees C case temperature.
Six-month hardware placement: ran bench pre-compliance scans on 5 products, built the test fixtures, and documented a 180 MHz emissions peak the team traced to an unterminated clock line.
Completed 180 lab hours in analogue and digital design, including a discrete op-amp build characterised for gain-bandwidth and slew rate against LTspice predictions.
Format, length and keywords
- Two pages is normal in the UK once you have a few years of experience, and one page can work for graduates. Hardware careers accumulate products, so a second page listing products and standards is normal at senior level.
- Order: personal statement, experience (or projects first if you are a new graduate), skills and tools, education, certifications, patents and publications if you have them.
- Reverse-chronological with month and year. Contract design work is common; group short contracts under one heading with the clients described by sector, not by name if you are under NDA.
- Patents: list the number and title if granted, or "application filed" with the year. Do not describe confidential work in detail.
- No photo, no date of birth, no marital status. UK employers do not expect them. If you are applying from outside the UK, also drop the passport number and the personal details block.
- Plain layout, no columns or tables, PDF named lastname-electronics-engineer-cv.pdf.
Mirror these from the advert when they are true of you: PCB design, schematic capture, Altium, OrCAD, Allegro, KiCad, mixed-signal, analogue design, power supply design, signal integrity, EMC, EMI, CISPR 32, IEC 61000, UKCA, DFM, DFT, BOM, bring-up, board spin, oscilloscope, spectrum analyser, LTspice, MATLAB, embedded C, SPI, I2C, CAN, RS-485.
Frequently asked questions
How do I write an electronics engineer CV?
Lead with a three-line personal statement naming your domain, what you own end to end, one product detail and one number. Then experience in reverse order, three to five bullets a job, each tied to a product, a decision or a measurement. Add a tools block with your CAD, simulator and lab instruments. Two pages is normal once you have a few years of experience.
What skills should an electronics engineer put on a CV?
Circuit design by type (analogue, mixed-signal, power, high-speed), your CAD and simulation tools by name, interfaces and MCU families, EMC and safety standards you have worked to, lab instruments you use, and any code you write for bring-up and test. Add DFM, DFT and second sourcing if you have taken products to production.
What is a good career objective for an electronics engineer CV with no experience?
Two lines naming your degree and its accreditation, one project you took from schematic to working board, and the tools you used. For example: electronic engineering graduate seeking a graduate hardware role, having designed, ordered, assembled and debugged a 4-layer motor controller in KiCad and completed a six-month EMC pre-compliance placement.
How do I write an electronics engineer CV as a graduate?
Put a Projects section above education and describe two or three builds properly: what it does, the tools, the part that did not work, and how you fixed it. Move placements and internships into the experience section with numbers. List tools honestly by level of use. Leave out the photo, date of birth and personal details block for UK applications.
Should I list projects on an electronics engineer CV?
Yes, at any level, but for different reasons. New graduates use projects instead of experience. Experienced engineers use them to show work their day job did not cover, such as an RF board or an FPGA design. Keep it to two or three, and say what shipped or what you measured.
How many pages should an electronics engineer CV be?
Two pages is standard for experienced engineers in the UK, and one page can work for graduates. Use the second page for a product, standards and patent list rather than more responsibility statements. Academic CVs with full publication lists are a different document and are only expected for research roles.
What is the difference between an electronics engineer and an electrical engineer CV?
Electronics work tends to be board-level: components, PCB layout, embedded interfaces, EMC and product release. Electrical engineering often means power systems, machines, building distribution or utility work, with BS 7671 and professional registration in the foreground. Aim your CV at the adverts you want and use their vocabulary, because the titles are used loosely.
Do electronics engineers need to be chartered?
Usually not. There is no licence to practise in the UK, and chartership (CEng through the IET) matters most in consultancy, defence, power and safety-critical work, where employers often support graduates towards it. IET membership is still worth listing early in your career. For electronics, an IPC Certified Interconnect Designer credential often says more about your day-to-day skill.
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How this page was made: a first draft was written with AI assistance from cvplex's example library, then edited and fact-checked by the cvplex Careers Team. Examples are fictional composites; numbers are illustrative. Report an error via the editorial policy page.