Battery Software & Controls Integration Engineer, Energy StoragePosted today$152K
The opportunity
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.
What you'll do
Hands-On Pack Bring-Up & Reverse Engineering: Lead physical benchtop and lab bring-up of diverse second-life EV battery packs. Probe wiring harnesses, capture and decode proprietary CAN/CAN-FD/LIN/Ethernet traffic, spoof vehicle-level wake/keep-alive and crash/interlock signals, and command pre-charge and main contactor sequencing to run packs safely off-vehicle.
OEM BMS Algorithm Validation: Design and execute rigorous hardware and HIL test campaigns to audit native OEM BMS algorithms under stationary grid duty cycles. Validate the accuracy of existing BMS state estimations—including State of Charge (SoC), State of Health (SoH), dynamic charge/discharge power limits (SoP), internal resistance growth, and fault thresholds—against true electrochemical and thermal performance.
In-House Algorithm Integration: Implement and integrate the software for Redwood’s proprietary battery state-estimation, degradation-mitigation, and active balancing/derating algorithms (in Rust or C/C++) either atop or in bypass of native OEM BMS telemetry, reconciling discrepancies between legacy automotive logic and second-life pack realities.
Software Gateways & Deterministic Control Interfaces: Architect and deploy resilient, low-latency software abstraction layers and translation gateways on embedded targets that normalize heterogeneous pack telemetry, manage complex fault state machines, and interface seamlessly with our Power Conversion Systems (PCS) and site controllers.
Technical OEM & Supplier Leadership: Serve as the primary technical counterpart to external automotive OEMs and Tier-1 BMS suppliers. Drive deep-dive engineering reviews to negotiate custom passive-monitor BMS firmware builds, extract charge/discharge lookup tables, understand pyrotechnic disconnect/fuse curves, and establish deterministic command hooks.
SIL/HIL & Physical Hardware Verification: Partner with validation and power electronics teams to model pack dynamics, inject sensor and contactor faults on HIL benches (Typhoon HIL/Opal-RT) and physical cyclers, and verify functional safety boundaries before field deployment.
What they're looking for
- Background: MS, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering,: Chemical/Electrochemical Engineering, or a related field, with 5+ years of hands-on experience in BMS firmware/controls development, battery pack bring-up, or EV/BESS battery integration.
- Battery & BMS Domain Mastery: Deep, practical understanding of lithium-ion battery physics (LFP, NMC, etc.), equivalent circuit modeling (ECM), Kalman filtering (EKF/UKF), Coulomb counting, dynamic power/current limit calculation, cell balancing topologies, and high-voltage safety architecture (HVIL, isolation monitoring, contactor weld detection, pyro-fuses).
- Reverse Engineering & Lab Hardware Fluency: Proven ability to walk up to an undocumented or partially documented battery pack and get it running. Expert proficiency with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, CANalyzer/CANoe/busmaster, high-voltage power supplies/cyclers, and diagnostic protocols (UDS, CCP/XCP, J1939, CAN/CAN-FD, Automotive Ethernet, Modbus).
- Production Software & Controls Toolchain: Strong programming proficiency in Rust and C/C++, within real-time embedded and Linux environments, alongside data analysis and modeling tools (MATLAB/Simulink, Pandas/SciPy) to evaluate and benchmark BMS algorithm performance against lab cycler data.