Board Test Engineer

A board test engineer makes sure printed circuit boards (PCBs) - the green boards covered in chips and components inside almost every electronic product - actually work before they ship. They design and run the tests that catch faults in manufacturing, write the test programs that automated test equipment uses, and diagnose boards that fail. The work usually sits in an electronics manufacturer, a contract manufacturer that builds boards for other companies, or the production side of a defence, aerospace, medical device or industrial equipment firm.

Starting salary: £26k–£34k
Live graduate jobs: 1 open now
Main way in: Direct application to a graduate or junior test engineer…
They usually ask for: A degree in electrical or electronic engineering is the usual…

Approximate graduate salary

Typically somewhere around £26,000–£34,000 to start, though this varies widely. Larger defence, aerospace and semiconductor employers and roles in higher-cost areas tend to sit at the upper end or above; smaller contract manufacturers and regions with lower costs tend to sit lower. Shift work, on-call cover or security clearance can attract additional payments at some employers.

What you'd actually do

Writing and debugging test programs for automated test equipment - commonly in-circuit test (ICT, where probes touch pads on the board to check individual components), flying probe testers, or functional test rigs that power the board up and check it behaves correctly
Investigating boards that failed on the production line: reading test logs, probing with an oscilloscope or multimeter, comparing against the schematic, and working out whether it's a bad component, a solder defect, a design issue or a false failure from the test itself
Designing and building test fixtures - the jigs, bed-of-nails probe plates, cables and interface boards that connect a product to the tester - and sorting out the inevitable problems when the first one doesn't fit or make reliable contact
Writing test specifications and procedures, and the documentation that production operators and quality staff follow

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Talking to design engineers about 'design for test' - asking for test points, access to signals or a JTAG boundary-scan chain to be added to a new board before it goes to layout
Supporting production directly: when a line stops because yields have dropped, you are often the person expected to be on the shop floor within the hour
Logging and analysing failure data to spot patterns - a recurring fault on one component type, one supplier's parts, or one placement machine

How graduates get in

Direct application to a graduate or junior test engineer vacancy at an electronics manufacturer or contract electronics manufacturer (CEM). This is the most common route - many of these employers recruit ad hoc rather than through formal schemes.
Structured graduate schemes in engineering, which exist mainly at larger defence, aerospace, automotive and semiconductor employers; test is often one rotation within a broader manufacturing or systems engineering programme.
Via a placement year or summer internship in a manufacturing or test department, which frequently converts to a graduate offer - a strong route if your course offers it.
Moving across internally from a technician, test operator or repair role, often while studying part-time for an HNC/HND or degree. Common in this field and a genuinely respected path.

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Degree apprenticeships in electronic or manufacturing engineering, which lead to the same roles without the traditional graduate route.
Less commonly, from a software or embedded systems background into test software and automation work, where the emphasis is more on writing test frameworks than on hardware fault-finding.

What employers ask for

A degree in electrical or electronic engineering is the usual expectation. Related subjects - mechatronics, physics, computer/systems engineering, general engineering with electronics modules - are often accepted. A non-technical degree is rarely enough on its own.
An HND, HNC or foundation degree plus practical electronics experience is accepted by many employers, particularly contract manufacturers; this is not a field where only 2:1-from-a-research-university candidates get looked at.
Where a grade bar exists it is typically a 2:1 or 2:2, but many smaller manufacturers care far more about whether you can read a schematic and use a scope than about your classification.
Evidence you have actually built and debugged electronics - a final-year project, hobby projects, Arduino/Raspberry Pi work, a robotics team, repairing things. Being able to talk through a fault you diagnosed is worth a lot at interview.

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Some programming ability. Which language varies a lot: LabVIEW and TestStand are very common in test, but you may also meet C, C++, Python, or vendor-specific test program languages. Employers generally expect you to learn their stack on the job.
Security clearance eligibility if the employer is in defence or works on government programmes - this normally requires UK residency for a set period. Medical device and aerospace employers instead place heavy emphasis on working to regulated quality standards.

Skills that matter

Reading schematics and PCB layouts

Nearly every diagnosis starts with tracing a signal through the circuit diagram to work out what could plausibly cause the symptom you are seeing.

Hands-on use of test instruments

Oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies and logic analysers are your primary tools for proving where a board has gone wrong, and competence with them is assumed quickly.

Structured fault-finding

The job is fundamentally about narrowing a problem down logically rather than swapping parts until it works - and about knowing when the board is fine and the test is wrong.

Test automation and scripting

Most of your output is code that runs unattended on a production line, so writing test sequences that are reliable, repeatable and don't throw false failures is the core deliverable.

Soldering and rework

You will often need to fit a test wire, lift a component leg or repair a board yourself rather than waiting for a technician, especially on prototypes.

Explaining technical findings to non-specialists

You regularly have to tell production managers why the line is stopped, and persuade design engineers to change a board they consider finished.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Graduate or junior test engineer: working under supervision on existing test programs, debugging failed boards and supporting fixtures already in use. Typically a year or two before you own work independently.
Test engineer: owning the test strategy for specific products - writing new test programs from scratch, specifying fixtures, and being the point of contact for that product line's yield and failures.
Senior or lead test engineer: setting test approach across multiple products, reviewing new designs for testability before layout, mentoring juniors and dealing with capital spend on test equipment. Timeframes vary widely by employer size.
From there the paths fork. Some move into test management or manufacturing/production engineering management; some move sideways into hardware design, validation, quality or reliability engineering, where the fault-finding background is valued; some specialise deeply in a niche such as boundary scan, RF test or automated test software architecture.
Chartered Engineer (CEng) status through the IET is a recognised milestone, usually pursued some years in and often supported by larger employers; it matters more in defence, aerospace and consultancy than in smaller contract manufacturing.

What people get wrong

“It's a quality-control job - you just press a button and watch boards pass or fail.”

The operator presses the button. The engineer builds the thing the operator uses: designing the test coverage, writing the software, building the fixture and then diagnosing everything the test flags. A lot of it is genuine development work.

“Test is where you end up if you weren't good enough for design.”

Test engineers often develop broader practical knowledge than designers, because they see how hundreds or thousands of real boards actually fail rather than how one works in simulation. Moving from test into design is a well-trodden path, and design-for-test input is taken seriously in well-run companies.

“You'll be at a bench with a soldering iron all day.”

A substantial share of the week is software - writing and maintaining test sequences - plus meetings with design and production, documentation, and supplier or equipment vendor discussions. The proportion of bench time varies enormously between employers.

“Finding the fault is the end of the job.”

Finding it is often the easy part. The valued output is stopping it recurring - changing the test, the process, the fixture or the design - and being able to show, with failure data, that it worked.

Where this varies

The role differs a lot by employer type. At a high-volume contract manufacturer, the focus is throughput, cycle time and yield - you may support many different customers' products, work to tight production pressure and spend significant time on the shop floor, sometimes on shifts. At a defence, aerospace, space or medical device company, volumes are low, documentation and traceability requirements are heavy, test may be as much about proving compliance as catching defects, and security clearance or regulated quality systems shape the job. In semiconductor and RF companies the emphasis shifts towards specialist instrumentation and signal integrity. In small firms you may cover test, production engineering and some design at once; in large ones you'll be a specialist within a big engineering function. Geographically, electronics manufacturing in the UK clusters around places like the South West and South Coast, Cambridge and East Anglia, the Midlands, South Wales, parts of the North West and Central Scotland, so availability of roles is uneven across the country.

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General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.