Senior Electrical Engineer, Power Electronics

GRAM; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 155,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Benefits

Equity

Job summary

GRAM is seeking a Senior Electrical Engineer, Power Electronics, to own power conversion, distribution, switching, protection, and measurement from architecture through released hardware in Palo Alto. The role covers motor-drive electronics, electro-permanent magnets, and battery interfaces, with a goal of quantified operating envelopes and reliable fault behavior.

You will design, test, and validate switching converters and motor drives, model losses and thermal limits, bring up hardware with

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience releasing and bringing up switching converters and motor drives.
• Experience with MOSFET or GaN switching and gate-drive design.
• Ability to design from duty cycles, transients, and fault cases.

Responsibilities

• Convert actuator, magnetic, compute, sensing, and mission duty cycles into power budgets, transient requirements, efficiency targets, thermal limits, protection thresholds, and validation plans.
• Design and release switching power converters, motor-drive or pulsed-load stages, gate drives, sensing circuits, protection networks, power distribution, and supporting multilayer printed circuit boards.
• Model switching behavior, conduction loss, magnetics, parasitics, control-loop stability, fault energy, and junction temperatures using first-principles calculations and circuit simulation.
• Bring up hardware with oscilloscopes, differential and current probes, electronic loads, power analyzers, thermal instrumentation, and automated acquisition under normal and injected-fault conditions.
• Diagnose failures involving overcurrent, shoot-through, saturation, ringing, grounding, electromagnetic interference, thermal runaway, brownout, or interactions among loads and controls.
• Define drive and power interfaces across actuators, electro-permanent magnets, embedded control, energy sources, mechanical packaging, and machine-level safety systems.
• Carry designs through layout review, supplier fabrication, assembly, environmental test, manufacturing test, nonconformance closure, and verified revision release.
• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Demonstrated command of MOSFET or GaN switching, gate-drive design, current sensing, protection, feedback stability, magnetics, loss calculation, thermal design, and power-PCB layout.
• Built an instrumented validation setup and measured efficiency, switching waveforms, transient response, electromagnetic behavior, protection timing, and thermal margin across a defined operating envelope.
• Closed a hardware failure that prevented operation or violated a defined limit by reproducing it, identifying the root cause, implementing a design change, and demonstrating the correction through repeated test.

Skills

MOSFET switching

GaN switching

Gate-drive design

Current sensing

Protection networks

Thermal design

Power-PCB layout

Magnetics

Control-loop stability

Circuit simulation

Oscilloscope use

Test instrumentation

Education

Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering

Tools

Oscilloscopes

Differential probes

Current probes

Power analyzers

Electronic loads

Thermal instrumentation

Job description

Senior Electrical Engineer, Power Electronics

The Mission

GRAM is a self replication company creating populations of insectoids for the physical economy.

Our first research frontier is self-preservation: the base case of physical self-replication. Our machines will survive, coordinate, and recover without humans. We believe scalable machine labor requires more than single-agent task generality or machines shaped in our image.

You will own power conversion, distribution, switching, protection, and measurement from architecture through released hardware. The scope includes motor-drive electronics, electro-permanent-magnet pulse drivers, point-of-load conversion, current and voltage sensing, energy-storage interfaces, grounding, electromagnetic compatibility, and thermal design. You will design from measured machine duty cycles, transients, and fault cases rather than nominal component ratings. The system must drive compact actuators and pulsed magnetic loads without compromising sensing, computation, or communications. Success means every power path has a quantified operating envelope, known fault behavior, traceable margin, and measured performance on the integrated machine.

What you will do

• Convert actuator, magnetic, compute, sensing, and mission duty cycles into power budgets, transient requirements, efficiency targets, thermal limits, protection thresholds, and validation plans.
• Design and release switching power converters, motor-drive or pulsed-load stages, gate drives, sensing circuits, protection networks, power distribution, and supporting multilayer printed circuit boards.
• Model switching behavior, conduction loss, magnetics, parasitics, control-loop stability, fault energy, and junction temperatures using first-principles calculations and circuit simulation.
• Bring up hardware with oscilloscopes, differential and current probes, electronic loads, power analyzers, thermal instrumentation, and automated acquisition under normal and injected-fault conditions.
• Diagnose failures involving overcurrent, shoot-through, saturation, ringing, grounding, electromagnetic interference, thermal runaway, brownout, or interactions among loads and controls.
• Define drive and power interfaces across actuators, electro-permanent magnets, embedded control, energy sources, mechanical packaging, and machine-level safety systems.
• Carry designs through layout review, supplier fabrication, assembly, environmental test, manufacturing test, nonconformance closure, and verified revision release.
• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience developing power-electronic hardware.
• Released and brought up a switching converter, inverter, motor drive, pulsed-power circuit, battery-power stage, or comparable product using controlled schematics, layout, bill of materials, and revision history.
• Demonstrated command of MOSFET or GaN switching, gate-drive design, current sensing, protection, feedback stability, magnetics, loss calculation, thermal design, and power-PCB layout.
• Built an instrumented validation setup and measured efficiency, switching waveforms, transient response, electromagnetic behavior, protection timing, and thermal margin across a defined operating envelope.
• Closed a hardware failure that prevented operation or violated a defined limit by reproducing it, identifying the physical or electrical root cause, implementing a design change, and demonstrating the correction through repeated test.

Preferred experience

• Compact motor drives, high-current robotics, electro-permanent-magnet drivers, pulsed inductive loads, or other mass-constrained power systems.
• Battery management, isolated conversion, regenerative loads, functional safety circuits, or redundant power architectures.
• EMI and EMC qualification, high-reliability electronics, automated end-of-line test, or transition from prototype boards to repeat production.

The annual base salary range for this Palo Alto position is $155,000–$195,000. Health coverage, benefits, and generous equity come with the role. This role is on-site in Palo Alto. We review what you’ve shipped; if it’s the caliber we seek, interviews take about a week, start to finish. We treat your work and conversations with discretion.