Senior Electrical Engineer, Power Electronics

The Mission

GRAM is a self-replication company creating machine labor for the physical economy.

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

About the role

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.

Minimum qualifications

• 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.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this Palo Alto position is $155,000–$195,000. An offer within this range will reflect the position’s approved scope and the candidate’s demonstrated role-relevant skills and experience.

Working at GRAM

This role is based on-site in Palo Alto. Work moves among schematic and layout review, bench characterization, dynamometer testing, thermal measurement, machine bring-up, and failure teardown.

Interview Process

After submitting your application, we review your portfolio and any exceptional work you've shipped. If your application demonstrates the caliber we seek, you'll enter our interview process, which is designed for speed and substance. We aim to complete it within one week from start to finish.

Trust in the Process

GRAM expects deep trust and ownership from its people, and we begin by extending the same to candidates. We treat your information, prior work, and conversations with discretion.