Power Electronics and Motor Test Engineer

Defence / Unmanned Aircraft | On-site, Reading | Competitive salary + founding-team equity

My client is a fast-growing UK defence technology company that designs and manufactures electric propulsion systems (brushless motors, power electronics, firmware and control algorithms) primarily for unmanned aircraft.

Unlike most of the industry, they don't subcontract. Motor production, electronics assembly and test are all done in-house at their UK site, and they own their own PCB fabrication facility in Europe, so they control every board from layout to assembly. Most propulsion hardware in this market is made in China, and defence customers increasingly won't accept that. This vertically integrated model positions the company to fill that gap.

They are now moving from prototype to volume production. The engineering team is small but growing quickly, key leadership is in place, and they are hiring exceptional engineers to build out the team.

This is a founding test role, reporting to the Head of Engineering. You will own performance testing of the company's motor controllers and motors: designing the tests, building the equipment to run them, and producing the data the design team makes decisions from.

There is no existing test plan and no existing lab. You will decide what is worth measuring, work out how to measure it properly, and build the facility to do it. You start as a team of one, and the role grows into leading the test function and hiring into it as the product range expands.

The work has two strands:

• Development testing alongside the design team, to establish how the company's products and competitors' products actually perform. This is the current focus.
• Independent verification
  , confirming that shipped products meet their stated specifications independently of the people who designed them. This becomes more important as designs mature, and you will build that capability as the need arises.

Your first project is to characterise the in-house motor controller against competitor products on the same rig and under the same conditions. That comparison will show where the product stands, provide the evidence for setting future requirements, and become the benchmark for every product that follows. The programme then extends to motor performance and life testing across real in-service conditions.

You don't need deep experience in both power electronics and motor testing on day one. Strength in one and a genuine interest in learning the other is a good starting point.

• Characterise motor controllers across the full operating envelope, including efficiency mapping, thermal behaviour and derating, switching and conduction losses, ripple, and control loop response, and explain what the results mean for the design.
• Run like-for-like benchmarking against competitor products, and maintain the comparison used by both engineering and commercial teams.
• Turn benchmark data into performance requirements for next-generation designs, and track products against them.
• Specify, source, commission and calibrate test equipment (power analysers, electronic loads and supplies, oscilloscopes, current probes, thermal imaging, DAQ, and a dynamometer), including building the business case for capital spend.
• Design and build test rigs, fixtures and instrumentation with the workshop, hardware and firmware teams.
• Extend testing to motors: dyno characterisation, torque/speed/efficiency mapping, back-EMF and parameter measurement, thermal profiling and life testing.
• Plan and set up the test facility, including layout, dyno cells, and environmental and life test capability as the programme grows.
• Manage test data so…