Founding Electrical Engineer

Overview

Expand Power is a small but mighty team dedicated to building flexible, solid state transformers and modular power electronics for a distributed, decentralized grid with increased visibility, resiliency, reliability, and energy accessibility.

Expand Power is building solid-state transformers and modular power electronics for a decentralized, resilient grid. We’re a small team doing hard, meaningful engineering, and we’re just getting started.

We’re backed by several Department of Energy programs, Berkeley National Laboratory, the Activate Fellowship, and world-class pre-seed investors and VCs. Our advisory network includes prominent leaders in power electronics, high frequency magnetics, the electric utility industry, and deep tech commercialization.

We’re at a critical inflection point in the grid, where we have new sources and loads at a capacity that we couldn’t have dreamed of. Traditional grid electronics, with their lack of control and DC based capabilities, just can’t keep up. With real customer demand, we’re closing the gap between the grid of today and the grid of the future by building innovative smart transformers and modular power electronics.

We’re excited to commercialize and deploy our technology across multiple customers for real world impact. We are growing the team and are looking for passionate, dedicated, ambitious hires who are excited by ownership and the electrification of our grid.

This role is critical to Expand’s success—you will be working closely with the founders in the lab and in the field with real customers, reporting to the CEO. As our first full-time engineering hire, you will lead technical development of our proprietary power electronics technology for immediate deployment. You will own the development of Expand’s DC-DC module—architecture, design, bring-up, testing, and customer pilots.

You will have a critical role in shaping the core technology, product direction, and culture of a cross-functional and rapidly growing early stage company. You’ll be one of the most valuable founding members of a company shaping the future of the electric grid. In doing so, you will push the limits of what’s achievable with high-frequency power electronics. The successful candidate can drive their own projects today and grow with the company into senior leadership roles, such as those at the VP and C-suite level.

You will be leading the design and development of Expand’s DC-DC module and, in doing so, spearheading the advancement of next-generation power converter designs. You’ll own the hardware development cycle, including requirements definition, modeling, simulation, schematic capture, layout, prototyping, testing, and characterization. You’ll lead the company’s technical roadmap while navigating regulatory compliance.

You’ll also use creativity and innovation to:

• Design and develop power conversion systems (including AC-DCs, DC-ACs, and DC-DCs), from first principles to test and validation to deployment for manufacturability and flexibility, around novel magnetics
• Mentor and guide more junior engineers
• Simulate and model circuits and converters to maximize performance and reliability
• Conduct lab testing, validation, and debugging of prototype hardware
• Document technical specifications, architecture decisions, and validation reports
• Collaborate on IP generation
• Support thermal design, EMI/EMC compliance, and failure analysis
• Support firmware and control algorithm development for stable and high-performance operation

Required Experience

You’ve done this before: you are a highly experienced electrical engineer, a master of your craft. Simulating, designing, debugging, and characterizing power converters is your bread and butter, but it still gives you excitement and fulfillment, especially with a mission you care deeply about. You have a proven track record of driving and implementing innovation. This probably means you have at least eight years of experience.

You also have experience in

• High frequency and high power converters, such as modular multilevel converters, resonant converters, or MVDC…