Last updated: October 6, 2026
By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1
An electrical engineer job description should name the voltage class, the deliverable the engineer hands off, whether that work carries a PE seal, the field and energized-work split, and a base range, roughly $90,000 to $158,000 in 2026.
Most postings skip all five. They describe electrical engineering in general, and the people who apply are electrical engineers in general, which is a much bigger and much less useful group than the one you need.
For nearly fifteen years I have read engineering postings by the hundreds, most of them on our electrical engineering staffing desk, usually in the week a hiring manager calls to ask why the applicants look wrong. The applicants are rarely wrong. They answered the posting that was written.
A power supply manufacturer in Lowell, Massachusetts, is the clearest example I have. About 110 people. They design isolated AC-DC supplies for lab instruments and industrial controls, 150 watts to 1.2 kilowatts, and they sell into customers who care a great deal about safety approvals. Their electrical engineer posting had been live for seven weeks. Seven. It asked for “experience designing, developing, and testing electrical systems,” “knowledge of the National Electrical Code,” and “AutoCAD proficiency.”
Somebody had copied it from a facilities template. Nobody noticed.
It drew 142 applicants. The engineering manager sent me the strongest dozen. I read them twice. Four came from building design firms, where the NEC is the daily rulebook and AutoCAD is the drawing tool. Three came from a regional utility. Two had laid out microcontroller boards. Not one had designed an offline power supply, which was the only thing the job actually involved.
We rewrote the first paragraph and nothing else at first. It now said the engineer would design isolated supplies from 90 to 264 volts AC input, lay them out in Altium, and carry them through UL 61010-1 and IEC 62368-1 safety testing and FCC Part 15 Class B emissions testing. Sixty-one people applied in the next four weeks. Fewer than half the earlier count. Nine of them had shipped offline supplies, and the company hired one from a medical device maker in New Hampshire at $146,000 base.
The work did not change. The document did.
Electrical Engineering Splits by Voltage Before It Splits by Anything Else
Our electrical engineer recruiters sort roles by frequency, from DC and 60 Hz power up through RF. That is how we scope a search. A posting needs a second axis, and for most hiring managers it is the easier one to write down, because they already know it. What voltage does this person touch?
The industry has a formal vocabulary for this. ANSI C84.1, the standard that sets utility voltage ratings in the United States, defines low voltage as 1,000 volts or less, medium voltage as above 1,000 volts and below 100 kV, and high voltage as 100 kV through 230 kV, as Consulting-Specifying Engineer summarizes. Board designers live below all of that, mostly in single and double digits.
| Voltage Class | Typical Range | Where the Work Usually Is | What the Posting Should Add |
|---|---|---|---|
| Board level | Mostly under 50 V on the board itself | PCB design, embedded hardware, sensors, test fixtures | The EDA tool (Altium, OrCAD, or Cadence Allegro), the processor or FPGA family, and the bring-up lab |
| Power conversion | 90 to 600 V on the input side, DC buses near 800 V in EV and storage work | Power supplies, inverters, motor drives, chargers | Topology, power level, the safety standard (UL 61010-1, IEC 62368-1, UL 2202), and the emissions target |
| Low-voltage power and controls | 1,000 V or less, mostly 120/208 V and 277/480 V | Facilities, MCCs, panel shops, plant distribution | The NEC edition you design to, UL 508A if you build panels, and whether the engineer does energized work |
| Medium voltage | 1 kV to under 100 kV, often 4.16, 12.47, 13.8, or 34.5 kV | Campus and data center distribution, solar and storage collector systems, utility feeders | The study software (ETAP, SKM PowerTools, or EasyPower), switching duties, and the PE seal |
| High voltage and above | 100 kV and up | Transmission lines, substations, interconnection | Utility standards, protective relay platforms such as SEL, and the PE seal |
One line in the first paragraph covers it. “You will design 480-volt distribution and 12.47 kV service upgrades for food processing plants” tells a power engineer to keep reading and tells a board designer to stop. Both outcomes help you.
Mixed roles exist. They are real. A controls engineer at a packaging line might lay out a 24-volt I/O board on Monday and size a 480-volt feeder on Thursday. Say that, in that order, with a rough split. If one side is 80 percent of the week, the posting should read like it.
Write Down the Last Thing the Engineer Hands Off
Duties lists describe activity. Design, develop, test, support, collaborate. Every electrical engineer does all five, which is why those words filter nobody.
The deliverable filters. It is the artifact that leaves the engineer’s desk and goes to somebody else, and it is different for almost every electrical job I fill.
- A sealed one-line diagram, short-circuit study, and protective device coordination study, handed to a contractor and an authority having jurisdiction.
- Schematic, layout, and bill of materials, released to a contract manufacturer through Arena or a similar PLM system. That release is the moment the board becomes somebody else’s cost.
- Panel drawings in AutoCAD Electrical or EPLAN, handed to the shop floor.
- A test report. Sometimes the whole job is getting a product through a UL or TÜV lab without a second trip.
- Commissioning sign-off at a customer site, on a drive or a switchgear lineup you did not design.
Pick one. Two at most. Then write the tool list from the deliverable backward. Studies mean ETAP or SKM. Boards mean Altium or Cadence. Panels mean EPLAN or AutoCAD Electrical, and simulation means LTspice, PLECS, or SIMetrix, depending on who is asking. A posting with nine EDA tools and three study packages is a posting where nobody decided what the job produces.
Our guide to hiring an electrical engineer covers the broader tool-list mistakes. The narrower point here is order. Deliverable first, tools second. And if the seat is mostly firmware on somebody else’s board, the embedded software engineer job description template will serve you better than this one.
Say Whether Anything Gets Sealed
One sentence. It moves the candidate pool more than anything else you will write.
Here is the dividing line I use with clients. If what the engineer produces ends up inside a product, a PE is rare and usually irrelevant. If it ends up in a permit set, a utility interconnection file, or a building, somebody licensed in that state signs it, and the posting should say whether that somebody is the new hire. NCEES offers three versions of the electrical PE exam, and most of the engineers stamping one-lines took Power. That is the pool our power systems engineering staffing team recruits from.
Tacoma, Washington. A twelve-person consultancy doing shore power and plant distribution for port tenants, 480 volts and 12.47 kV, mostly. The firm’s posting said “PE preferred.” Preferred. What the principal actually needed was somebody stamping Washington drawings within a year, since the only other licensed engineer at the firm planned to retire next spring.
Nobody said that out loud until the third interview.
Their finalist, a sharp EIT, was four months from eligibility for the exam. Fine, on paper. Except he was studying for the electronics and controls version, because his last job had been drives, and he had zero interest in a stamping career. He bowed out. Eleven weeks gone.
The rewrite read, “PE licensed in Washington, or licensed in another state and able to obtain Washington licensure within six months. You will seal one-lines and coordination studies.” Applications dropped by two-thirds. Good. The firm hired a licensed power engineer relocating from Boise at $161,000 base, inside the senior power systems band in our electrical engineer salary guide.
For entry-level seats the matching line is about the FE exam, which NCEES calls “generally your first step” toward licensure. Asking for it, or offering to pay for it, tells a new graduate whether the company plans to put them on the PE path at all. Many good candidates care about that more than the base.
Field Time and Energized Work Belong in the Posting Body
Most electrical engineer postings put the physical side in a boilerplate block at the bottom. Able to lift 25 pounds. Occasional travel.
That block is where the Erie, Pennsylvania, hire went wrong. An industrial equipment maker there hired an Engineer II for its drives group. The posting said “up to 25 percent travel,” and the candidate, coming from a lab job, pictured supplier visits and a trade show. The first assignment was two weeks commissioning variable-frequency drives at a customer plant, in arc-rated clothing, troubleshooting 480-volt cabinets with a 650-volt DC bus inside them.
He was capable. He was also blindsided. He left after four months, and the manager said, fairly, that the posting had never told him. What the group really needed was an engineer who had already logged a few hundred hours inside customer plants with a meter in one gloved hand and a drive manual in the other, and not one line of that posting asked for it.
If the engineer will work on or near exposed energized parts, write it in the body, with the voltage. OSHA’s electrical training rule, 29 CFR 1910.332, requires qualified persons to be trained to distinguish exposed live parts, determine nominal voltage, and know the clearance distances they must keep. A candidate who has done that work will recognize the language. A candidate who has not will know to ask. Either way, the conversation happens before the offer, not on the plant floor.
The same goes for site percentage, on-call, and lab days. Board designers need the bench. Power engineers need the site. Simple. Neither can do the job from a kitchen table, and our electrical engineer interview questions include the safety screen we use once that line is written.
Pay Follows the Specialization, and Washington Wants It Printed
Electrical engineers earned a national median of $120,630 in May 2025, the figure the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports in its Occupational Outlook Handbook. That number is real. Useful, too. It is also an average across every voltage class in the table above, which is why it rarely matches the offer a specific seat needs.
Our salary guide breaks bands out by specialization. These rows are copied from it.
| Specialization | Mid-Level Base | Senior Base |
|---|---|---|
| Power systems | $102K to $128K | $135K to $172K |
| Controls and automation | $95K to $122K | $128K to $168K |
| High-voltage power electronics | $118K to $148K | $152K to $195K |
| Embedded / hardware-firmware | $108K to $138K | $140K to $182K |
| Test and validation | $88K to $112K | $118K to $148K |
| Building / electrical contractor MEP | $88K to $108K | $115K to $142K |
By level, the same guide puts Engineer I and II at $90K to $118K and senior engineers at $118K to $158K, mid-vertical. Run your own metro through the salary benchmark assistant before you print anything.
Printing is the part people skip. Every time. Washington’s pay transparency law, RCW 49.58.110, says an employer with at least 15 employees must list a wage scale or salary range in every posting, plus a general summary of benefits and any other compensation offered. The Tacoma firm’s first posting said “DOE.” That fix went in with the seal sentence. Several other states have similar rules, and candidates in states without one have come to expect a range anyway, partly because the engineers who are good enough to be choosy tend to skip any posting that makes them guess whether a call is worth their lunch break.
One more thing on money. KORE1 earns a fee when someone we introduce accepts an offer and starts. I would still rather you post this yourself, fill the seat, and call us for the next one. Our engineering staffing team keeps 92 percent of its placements in the seat past the twelve-month mark, and that figure is far easier to keep when the posting was honest before we ever made a call.
Electrical Engineer Job Description Template
Copy it, fill in the brackets, and delete any section that does not apply. Bracketed notes marked “Internal” are for the hiring team and should not be published.
Job Title
[Electrical Engineer II, Power Systems] or [Senior Electrical Engineer, Power Electronics] or [Electrical Engineer I, Board Design]. Put the specialization in the title. Internal: if the title says only “Electrical Engineer,” the specialization has to be in the first sentence.
The Work and the Voltage
[Company] designs [product or facility type] for [customer type]. You will work mainly at [voltage class and range, for example 277/480 V distribution and 12.47 kV service, or board-level circuits under 50 V], on [two or three specific project types]. About [X] percent of the work is [main area] and [Y] percent is [secondary area].
What You Will Hand Off
[The deliverable, for example sealed one-line diagrams and coordination studies, schematics, layouts, and BOMs released to our contract manufacturer, or panel drawings for our UL 508A shop.] Internal: one or two deliverables. If you list five, rewrite.
Tools
[Two to four tools tied to the deliverable, for example ETAP and AutoCAD Electrical, or Altium Designer and LTspice.] We will train on [any tool you are willing to teach].
Licensure and Seal
[Pick one.] This role does not seal drawings, and no PE is required. Or, you will seal [document types] for projects in [state or states]. A PE license in [state], or the ability to obtain it within [X] months, is required. Or, we support the FE exam and the PE path, and we pay exam fees.
Field, Lab, and Energized Work
About [X] percent of your time is at [customer sites, substations, or our lab in City]. This role [does / does not] include work on or near exposed energized parts up to [voltage]. We provide NFPA 70E training and arc-rated PPE. [On-call schedule, if any.]
What You Bring
- A bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, or [equivalent].
- [X or more] years designing [the specific deliverable] at [the voltage class].
- Experience with [the one standard that governs the deliverable, for example NEC Article 240 overcurrent protection, UL 508A, IEC 62368-1, or IEEE 1584].
- [One more requirement that actually predicts success. Stop there.]
Not Required
[Anything a hiring manager might want but that should not screen people out, for example a master’s degree, a specific EDA tool you can teach, or industry experience in your exact sector.]
Pay, Benefits, and Location
Base salary [range]. [Bonus, if any.] [Benefits summary, including PE exam support or continuing education.] [City, State], [on-site, hybrid with X lab or site days, or remote]. [Citizenship or export-control requirement, if any, with the reason in plain words.]
Questions From the Req Review
Our work runs from 24-volt control boards to 480-volt panels. One posting or two?
Two postings, unless one person truly splits the week between them, which is less common than hiring managers expect. Board designers and power engineers apply for different reasons, read different sentences first, and come from different employers.
When it really is one seat, lead with whichever side takes more of the week and give the percentages. Our automation engineer job description template may also fit better than an EE posting if the board work is mostly I/O.
Should an entry-level posting ask for the FE exam?
Offer it rather than require it. A new graduate who has already passed the FE exam is a nice signal, but many strong ones have not sat it yet, and a requirement screens them out for nothing.
“We pay for the FE exam and support the PE path” pulls better than “FE required.” It tells them the company has a plan for them.
Is “PE preferred” a safe middle ground?
Only if it is true. If nobody will seal anything in the first two years, say the license is not required.
If someone will, say who, what, and by when. The Tacoma posting lost eleven weeks to the word “preferred.”
How many software tools belong in the posting?
Two to four, tied to the deliverable. More than that tells a strong candidate you have not decided what the role produces, and it filters out engineers who would learn your third tool in a month.
Name what you will teach. Free reach.
Do we really have to print the pay range?
In Washington, yes, once you have at least 15 employees, and the posting also needs a general description of benefits. California, Colorado, and New York have their own versions, and candidates elsewhere now treat a missing range as a warning sign.
It saves a phone call, too. Otherwise the first one goes to discovering you are $20,000 apart.
What changes when the role is a contract?
Mostly the top of the posting. Give the length, the project, the hours, and whether there is a path to direct hire, because experienced contract engineers sort on those four things before they read the duties.
The voltage, deliverable, and seal lines stay exactly the same. If you are weighing the two models, our pages on contract engineering staffing and direct hire placement lay out how each one runs.
Print the Voltage First
Five lines carry an electrical engineer posting. The voltage. The deliverable. The seal. The field and energized work. The range.
Everything else is formatting. Get those five right. Most applicants will then be the people you meant. The search gets shorter from there.
Want a second read before it goes live? Send it to our engineering desk. Someone who places electrical engineers every week will mark which of the five is missing. Usually it is the seal.
