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Abuse Test Engineer, New Product

Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials

Product, Quality Assurance
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Mar 8, 2025

About Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 to create a circular supply chain for electric vehicles and clean energy products, making them more sustainable and driving down the cost for batteries. We’re doing this by developing and deploying new technologies to increase the scope and scale of recycled and sustainable materials in the global battery supply chain.

Abuse Test Engineer, New Product

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.

The ideal candidate has a strong understanding of physics and the physics of failure. 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.

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.

Desired Qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s degree in physics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
  • Proven experience in abuse testing, preferably in the energy storage or renewable energy sector.
  • 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.

In accordance with California pay transparency laws, the salary range for this position is listed below. Actual compensation may vary based on a variety of factors, including experience, education, and skills.

California Pay Range:
$80,000$150,000 USD

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

We collect personal information (PI) from you in connection with your application for employment with Redwood Materials, including the following categories of PI: identifiers, personal records, professional or employment information, and inferences drawn from your PI. We collect your PI for our purposes, including performing services and operations related to your potential employment. If you have additional privacy-related questions, please contact us at privacy@redwoodmaterials.com.