R&D Test Engineer, Instrumentation
About the role
R&D Test Engineer with an instrumentation focus to design, build, and operate test fixtures and data acquisition systems for Gridware's Physical R&D team, owning test infrastructure across lab, warehouse, outdoor microgrid, and pilot-scale settings.
Responsibilities
- Develop and improve existing prototype physical experimentation infrastructure. Design and build test fixtures, rigs, and setups in collaboration with R&D Technicians and Research Engineers. Translate guidance and test intent from Research Engineers into a physical setup that produces trustworthy data.
- Architect, source, assemble, and operate electromechanical test setups end to end. Scope the build, select and procure components and instrumentation, manage vendors and machine shops, and get it working on the bench and at our test facilities.
- Instrument test articles and fixtures: select, mount, wire, and calibrate sensors (including strain gauges, load cells, accelerometers and IMUs, thermocouples, displacement and position sensors).
- Set up data acquisition systems using LabView that collects and parses data in a format readily ingestible by down stream data processing pipelines.
- Run experiments, with an emphasis on tests that are novel, ambiguous, or still changing shape as researchers continue to learn and gain valuable insights from the test infrastructure you create. Prepare equipment, execute the test, keep clean records, and deliver organized, well-labeled datasets.
- Work to improve repeatability via writing SOPs, setup and calibration procedures, and test reports. Train other teams and technicians to run mature test methods, and support the handoff until they are self-sufficient.
- Partner with research engineers to turn test intent into an executable plan — asking the questions needed to be confident the test will actually answer the question being asked.
- Own our R&D lab and its equipment: fixtures, instrumentation, calibration status, consumables, and safe operation as well as plan and conduct preventative maintenance.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in an engineering or related technical field, plus 3+ years of hands-on test, instrumentation, or lab engineering experience. Equivalent practical experience is also welcome.
- Instrumentation fundamentals: sensor selection, mounting and wiring, signal conditioning, calibration, and a working understanding of noise, grounding, sampling rate, and where measurement error comes from.
- Electronics bench work: soldering and harnessing, custom cabling, basic circuit troubleshooting.
- Practical shop skills: experienced with light power tools, basic fabrication and wiring and harnessing.
- Track record designing and executing instrumented tests in an industrial or research setting.
- Clear technical documentation: test plans, SOPs, and reports that someone else can follow without you in the room.
- Comfortable working with researchers as we learn and adapt to new information: able to plan and execute good tests within a scientific framing that others own, and curious enough to ask the questions that keep the tests providing robust data.
Skills
Benefits
- Health, Dental & Vision (Gold and Platinum with some providers plans fully covered)
- Paid parental leave
- Alternating day off (every other Monday)
- “Off the Grid”, a two week per year paid break for all employees.
- Commuter allowance
- Company-paid training
About Gridware
Protecting the grid today, preparing the grid for tomorrow
Gridware exists to enhance and protect the mother of all networks: the electrical grid. The grid touches everyone and makes our modern economy possible. But it’s also fragile. When the grid is compromised, everything grinds to a halt, and the consequences can be dire: wildfires burn, land is destroyed, property is damaged, progress stops, and lives are lost. Our team builds smart sensors that help utility companies to immediately detect, find, and fix outages and take steps to prevent new outages, and other related disasters, from happening at all. The need for power will only increase. We protect the grid of today while we build the grid of tomorrow. Gridware is privately held and backed by the best climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. We are headquartered in the Bay Area in northern California.
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