Sr. Power Electronics Hardware Engineer

Sr. Power Electronics Hardware Engineer

Odys Aviation is at the forefront of developing hybrid-electric aircraft to enable sustainable regional air travel. As the Sr. Power Electronics Hardware Engineer, you will be responsible for the design and development of our SiC-based propulsion power electronics - motor drives, active rectifiers, and DC/DC converters - supporting both the Laila (UAV) and Alta (Hybrid-electric VTOL) programs.

This role focuses on hardware design and physical realization. You will be tasked with architecting and delivering high-power-density SiC converter stages from concept through flight hardware, including schematic capture, PCB layout, magnetics, gate-drive and protection circuitry, thermal management, and EMI mitigation. Control algorithms, embedded firmware, and HIL infrastructure will remain with peer engineers; your responsibility is to deliver hardware that meets electrical, thermal, mechanical, and certification targets, and that enables the control system to extract full performance.

The primary deliverable is a propulsion power electronics stack that achieves aerospace-grade reliability, hits aggressive power-density and efficiency targets, and is manufacturable, testable, and robust under the full envelope of flight conditions.

Responsibilities

• Architect and design SiC-MOSFET-based motor drives, active rectifiers, and DC/DC converters operating at switching frequencies greater than 20–40 kHz, with focus on power density, efficiency, and reliability for airborne applications.
• Lead schematic capture and PCB layout (Altium, Cadence, or equivalent) for high-voltage, high-current power stages, including controlled-impedance routing, creepage and clearance per aerospace standards, and partitioning of power, signal, and gate-drive domains.
• Design gate-drive circuits tailored to SiC device physics, including isolated drivers, dv/dt and di/dt management, desat and short-circuit protection, miller-clamp strategies, and dead-time selection in coordination with the controls engineer.
• Design magnetic components - DC-link inductors, common-mode and differential-mode chokes, current sensors, and isolation transformers - including core selection, winding strategy, loss budgeting, and saturation analysis for high-frequency operation.
• Develop DC-link architecture and capacitor banks, including ripple-current budgeting, ESR/ESL management, lifetime analysis, and pre-charge/discharge circuitry.
• Lead thermal design of converter assemblies, including heatsink and cold-plate selection, junction-to-coolant thermal stack-up, transient thermal analysis, and coordination with mechanical engineering on cooling integration.
• Design EMI/EMC mitigation at the hardware level - input/output filters, shielding strategy, grounding architecture, and layout-level techniques - to meet DO-160 conducted and radiated emissions requirements.
• Define protection architecture including overvoltage, overcurrent, over temperature, ground-fault, and arc-fault detection circuitry, and partition responsibilities between hardware interlocks and firmware-level FDIR with the controls team.
• Specify and qualify power semiconductors, magnetics, capacitors, sensors, and connectors; drive component derating analyses, supplier evaluations, and second-source strategies appropriate for aerospace volumes.
• Lead board bring-up, double-pulse testing, and converter characterization on bench and dyno; correlate measured switching behavior, losses, and thermal performance with simulation and iterate the design to close gaps.
• Collaborate with the controls/software engineer to define sensor placement, current/voltage feedback signal conditioning, and ICD-level interfaces; ensure hardware exposes the observability needed for FOC, sensorless operation, and diagnostics.
• Produce deliverables aligned with DO-254, DO-160, and ARP
  4754B standards, including hardware design specifications, schematic and layout review packages, derating and stress analyses, FMEA/FMECA, and verification evidence.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Power Electronics, or related discipline.
• A minimum of 5 years of experience designing high-power motor…