Senior Electro-Hydraulic Test & Validation Engineer

Hydraulic Technologies; Rockford (IL); On-site; USD 95,000 - 145,000; Full time

Job summary

Hydraulic Technologies seeks a Senior Test & Validation Engineer to lead verification, reliability, qualification, and certification activities for high-pressure hydraulic and electro-hydraulic products.

This role establishes validation strategies throughout the New Product Development process and provides objective evidence that products satisfy performance, durability, safety, regulatory, and customer requirements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Engineering Technology, or related technical discipline.
• At least five years of product validation, reliability, test engineering, or product development experience involving fluid power, electro-mechanical systems, or industrial equipment.
• Experience developing and executing structured qualification and reliability test programs within a formal product development process.
• Strong knowledge of hydraulics, fluid-power circuits, electric motors, DC electrical systems, batteries, sensors, controls, and data acquisition.
• Ability to interpret hydraulic schematics, electrical schematics, wiring diagrams, engineering drawings, specifications, and industry standards.
• Hands-on proficiency with hydraulic instrumentation, multimeters, oscilloscopes, power supplies, load or torque measurement, and data acquisition systems.
• Demonstrated analytical, troubleshooting, project-planning, technical-writing, and cross-functional communication skills.
• Ability to work safely around high-pressure hydraulics, energized equipment, heavy components, and stored energy.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute DVP&R for new products, platform extensions, engineering changes, and major revisions.
• Translate requirements into measurable test methods, acceptance criteria, sample plans, instrumentation, and validation schedules.
• Conduct laboratory, field, and customer-site testing for performance, safety, durability, and environmental exposure.
• Generate qualification reports and provide recommendations for phase-gate and product-release decisions.
• Support prototype builds, design iterations, pilot builds, and post-launch issue resolution.
• Develop accelerated-life, cycle-life, endurance, fatigue, and environmental test methods.
• Characterize failure modes and support reliability-growth plans across product families.
• Apply statistical methods, including Weibull analysis where data supports it.
• Partner with design teams to mitigate risks and verify corrective actions through testing.
• Establish reusable validation standards and reliability methods across families.
• Lead testing of battery-powered and electro-hydraulic products and evaluate under representative conditions.
• Safely test high-pressure products up to 10,000 psi and above with guarding and lockout/tagout.
• Design, build, commission, and maintain test fixtures and equipment.
• Select and integrate instrumentation for pressure, flow, force, torque, displacement, temperature, voltage, current, and battery performance.
• Develop automated or semi-automated test systems using LabVIEW, Python, PLCs, NI data acquisition hardware.
• Improve repeatability, traceability, throughput, data integrity, calibration, and lab standard work.
• Develop benchmark plans for performance, durability, weight, ergonomics, serviceability, and reliability.
• Disassemble and evaluate competitive products; document approaches and failure modes; identify differentiation opportunities.
• Communicate benchmark findings to engineering and product management to support requirements and roadmaps.
• Analyze test data for compliance and communicate conclusions, risks, and recommendations.
• Correlate physical results with calculations and models; support root-cause investigations.
• Define containment and corrective-action verification tests with traceable records.

Skills

Hydraulics

Data acquisition

LabVIEW

Python

Electrical systems

Analytical skills

Safety compliance

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering

Bachelor's degree in Mechatronics Engineering

Engineering Technology

Tools

LabVIEW

Python

MATLAB

PLC programming

NI hardware

Job description

Hydraulic Technologies seeks a Senior Test & Validation Engineer to lead verification, reliability, qualification, and certification activities for high-pressure hydraulic and electro-hydraulic products.

This role establishes validation strategies throughout the New Product Development process and provides objective evidence that products satisfy performance, durability, safety, regulatory, and customer requirements.