Abuse Test Engineer, Energy Storage

About Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by JB Straubel, co-founder and former CTO of Tesla, on a simple but radical idea: the critical minerals powering the energy transition already exist. They just need to come back. Today Redwood is the largest lithium-ion battery recycler in North America — recovering, refining, and redeploying critical minerals from end-of-life batteries back into the supply chain.

On the energy side, Redwood has deployed the largest second-life battery project in the world, delivering power to AI data centers in months rather than years using proprietary energy architecture engineered entirely in-house. The company is profitable, the market it operates in is projected to grow 20 to 50 times over the next decade, and Redwood is the only company with the supply chain, the technology, and the operational scale to lead it.

Abuse Test Engineer, Energy Storage

Essential Duties:

As an early member of a new engineering team, you will be responsible for designing, executing, and analyzing tests that simulate extreme conditions and misuse scenarios to ensure the safety of our new product.

Collaborating with design and manufacturing engineering, you will identify potential failure modes and then intentionally abuse complex electromechanical and electrochemical systems (via short circuit, overvoltage, overheat, overcharge, and forced thermal propagation) in a controlled, well-instrumented, well-documented environment in order to stress those failure modes and ensure our products are robust to real world abuse.

You’re a doer, excited about getting your hands dirty and working in a dynamic, fast-paced setting, and want to shape a new department at Redwood.

If necessary, we will adjust the job level to suit your experience and responsibilities.

Responsibilities Will include:

• In addition to performing tests, you’ll help define and build the test infrastructure that will allow us to test swiftly, safely, and with excellent documentation
• You will also use your experience and understanding of failure mechanisms to help design new products to be as intrinsically robust to abuse as possible
• Designing, executing, and analyzing tests that simulate extreme conditions and misuse scenarios to ensure the safety of our new product
• Identify potential failure modes and then intentionally abuse complex electromechanical and electrochemical systems (via short circuit, overvoltage, overheat, overcharge, and forced thermal propagation) in a controlled, well-instrumented, well-documented environment in order to stress those failure modes and ensure our products are robust to real world abuse

Desired Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in physics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
• Strong understanding of physics and the physics of failure
• Proven experience with abuse tests, specifically UL9540a and related thermal propagation testing
• Proficiency in data analysis tools and software (e.g., MATLAB, Minitab, Python)
• Proven experience designing robust, fast-setup data acquisition rigs (e.g. temperature sensor) and actuation (e.g. heater, remote knife switch)
• Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team

The position is full-time. Compensation will be commensurate with experience.

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