Power Electronics Engineer

About Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by JB Straubel, co-founder and former CTO of Tesla, on a simple but radical idea: the critical minerals powering the energy transition already exist. They just need to come back. Today Redwood is the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in North America — recovering, refining, and redeploying critical minerals from end-of-life batteries back into the supply chain. On the energy side, Redwood has deployed the largest second-life battery project in the world, delivering power to AI data centers in months rather than years using proprietary energy architecture engineered entirely in-house. The company is profitable, the market it operates in is projected to grow 20 to 50 times over the next decade, and Redwood is the only company with the supply chain, the technology, and the operational scale to lead it.

Position Summary: 

The Power Electronics Engineer, Energy Storage designs and develops power conversion systems for Redwood's next-generation Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), including converters that interface with battery packs, battery modules, photovoltaic systems, and the grid for utility-scale and data center applications. This is a fully on-site role at 100 Hooper, San Francisco. The engineer independently owns complex circuit- and system-level problems spanning converter topology selection, power-stage component selection, magnetics design, PCB/PCBA layout, thermal analysis, and validation, adapting existing approaches and precedent to new and unusual design challenges. The role partners extensively with Mechanical, Firmware/Controls, Systems, Compliance, Supply Chain, and Manufacturing teams to take designs from concept through production. Success depends on sound engineering judgment, hands-on lab validation skills, and the ability to resolve ambiguous technical trade-offs with limited direction. 

Essential Duties and Responsibilities 

• Design high-voltage (800V – 25kVdc, 480–800Vac) and high-power (10kW–500kW) converters tailored for utility-scale BESS and industrial infrastructure. 
• Conduct comprehensive topology comparison and trade-off analyses evaluating efficiency, power density, cost, and manufacturability. 
• Perform power-stage component sizing and Si/SiC MOSFET selection based on loss modeling and thermal management. 
• Design robust gate driver circuits and dedicated gate driver power supplies to ensure safe, high-frequency switching operations. 
• Lead the design, modeling, and specification of custom magnetic components, including transformers and inductors utilizing Litz-wire or PCB-winding architectures. 
• Architect the low-voltage (LV) subsystem, including auxiliary power supplies, sensing circuitry (voltage/current/temperature), and hardware-level protection.