Hardware Engineer

What Does Hardware Engineer Mean?

A hardware engineer is a professional who works with hardware in various stages, from design to maintenance. The hardware engineer has to know how to work with things such as circuits, components and integrated circuits. His or her role is specific in today's highly virtualized computing world: The hardware engineer is responsible for the physical "guts" of an IT system, whatever that consists of: from servers to RAID or storage media, from PLCs to routing hardware – the hardware engineer worries about the physical electronics.

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Techopedia Explains Hardware Engineer

Hardware engineers may design, develop or test computer systems such as servers, rack setups, physical data partitions or any other type of hardware serving an IT architecture.

The role of the hardware engineer is changing over time. As more of the design process shifts to software systems, hardware engineers concentrate on how to build effectively, and how to support data-crunching with physical hardware systems. For example, a modern hardware engineer may spend a lot of time walking around a data center, checking on physical systems, as software engineers and artificial intelligence workers direct all of the vastly complicated activity happening within that physical data center.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…