Lead Controls Engineer - Power Electronics

Please note that we are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position.

Recruiting agencies:
Proper Voltage does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions. Please do not contact any employees directly unless you have an existing engagement with the company.

About Proper Voltage is unlocking the next generation of battery technology across robotics, data centers, and defense.

We're building intelligent battery systems that make advanced chemistries (sodium-ion, lithium-titanate, lithium-silicon) work in products that were never designed for them. Humanoid robots can upgrade power systems without redesigning their entire platform. Data centers get safer, cheaper backup power. Drones and autonomous vehicles get higher energy density without lengthy integration cycles.

If you want to work on hard engineering problems that matter this is the place.

Proper Voltage designs and builds safety-critical battery energy storage systems. This role leads control design for our bidirectional DC/DC power conversion stage — the current and voltage loops, mode transitions, and protection behavior of multiphase interleaved converters — from plant model through validated hardware.

This role sits where power electronics control meets software. You will model the plant, design and discretize the compensators, and prove them in closed‑loop simulation running the actual control code. Then you hand the firmware team a design they can implement without guesswork: coefficients, scaling, sample timing, delay budget, limits, and the margins the implementation must preserve.

You will work as a pair with our Lead Firmware Engineer – Power Conversion Control. You own what the loop should do and why; they own how it runs on the silicon. When measured loop gain disagrees with the model, you find out which one is wrong.

• Control design for four‑switch buck‑boost power stages and successor topologies: current and voltage loops, feed forward, multiphase interleaved operation, and phase current balancing.
• Plant models and closed‑loop simulation models for each converter, kept current with the hardware and used as the reference for firmware verification.
• Operating mode and protection behavior: the transition logic, thresholds, and response‑time requirements that firmware implements.
• Control design specifications — the documented interface between control design and firmware implementation.
• Control loop verification: model‑to‑measurement correlation, loop gain and stability margin characterization, transient response, and stability across the full operating envelope.
• Control performance evidence supporting UL 1973, UL 1998, and UL 9540 certification.

• Derive small‑signal plant models for buck, boost, four‑switch buck‑boost, and multiphase interleaved topologies, including coupled‑inductor effects, right‑half‑plane zeros, and operating‑point variation across the envelope.
• Design compensators (PID, type II/III, 2p2z/3p3z) and feed forward paths to meet bandwidth, phase margin, and gain margin targets for average current mode inner loops and voltage outer loops.
• Discretize designs for digital implementation, accounting for sampling, zero‑order hold, computational delay, and PWM update latency, and specify the sample rates and delay budget the firmware must meet.
• Build closed‑loop converter models in PLECS and/or MATLAB/Simulink from scratch, and use SPICE‑class tools for switching‑cell verification where averaged models fall short.
• Write code for simulation and analysis: scripted parameter sweeps, component‑tolerance and worst‑case analysis, and automated stability checks across the operating envelope in Python or MATLAB.
• Run the production C control code inside the simulation (PLECS C‑Script/DLL…