Sr. to Battery Pack Engineer – Autonomous Robotics

Sr. to Staff Battery Pack Engineer – Autonomous Robotics

Oakland, CA (you can work from home up to 1x/week)

You would own the end-to-end battery system for a cutting-edge robotic platform, from cell strategy through pack integration and real-world operation. Your work directly impacts safety, performance, and uptime, with deep hands‑on influence across mechanical, electrical, and robotics teams.

You would be joining an elite group of about 25 hardware engineers within a much larger public company. This org operates as a small, fast‑moving hardware innovation lab: minimal bureaucracy, real build/test cycles, and ownership of systems that ship and operate at a very large scale.

The company is targeting a salary range of $200-250k (more is possible for principal level candidates), plus RSUs translating into total first‑year compensation of roughly $300-450k.

• Owning end-to-end battery system design for the robot platform, including system architecture, requirements definition, and validation planning across energy density, power delivery, lifecycle, safety, and environmental constraints.
• Leading cell selection, supplier evaluation, and series/parallel configuration optimization to meet performance, reliability, and manufacturability targets.
• Designing mechanically robust battery packaging for dynamic robotic environments, ensuring structural integrity under shock, vibration, and drop conditions while optimizing serviceability, modularity, and production readiness within tight packaging constraints.
• Designing, modeling, and validating passive and active thermal management solutions to ensure safe operation across all environmental conditions, including peak load, fast charging, and thermal runaway mitigation.
• Defining charging architectures and profiles, collaborating on BMS integration and system-level power management, and balancing tradeoffs among charging speed, cycle life, uptime, and safety.
• Developing comprehensive safety architectures covering containment, venting, isolation, and propagation resistance, and leading hazard and failure analyses (FMEA/DFMEA) and abuse testing for regulatory compliance.
• Partnering cross-functionally with electrical, firmware, mechanical, robotics, manufacturing, and suppliers to support DFM/DFT, validation testing, field performance tracking, and continuous improvement.

• A Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering.
• At least 5 (preferably more) years of experience designing lithium-ion battery packs or high-performance battery systems.
• Demonstrated expertise in battery packaging and mechanical integration.
• Proven ability to optimize series and parallel configurations for performance and reliability.
• Hands‑on experience designing and validating thermal management and cooling systems.
• Practical experience defining charging architectures and managing battery lifecycle tradeoffs.
• Expertise in developing propagation resistance and safety mitigation strategies.
• Experience taking battery systems from concept through production and deployment.
• Working knowledge of BMS systems and battery modeling and simulation tools.

• Experience in robotics, EVs, drones, or other high dynamic-load applications.
• Experience designing batteries for ruggedized or mobile systems.
• Knowledge of manufacturing scale-up and supplier qualification.
• Experience with regulatory certification processes.
• Familiarity with simulation tools (thermal, structural, electrochemical modeling).