Battery Test Engineer (Lithium-Ion)

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States; on-site

Company

hirify.global develops aircraft battery systems and other safety-critical electric aerospace technologies.

What you will do

• Plan and execute electrical and thermal performance characterization for lithium-ion cells and aircraft battery packs.
• Design and run thermal-runaway initiation, propagation, containment, venting, mitigation, abuse, environmental, and durability tests.
• Prepare test articles, fixtures, chambers, power equipment, sensors, high-speed video, thermal imaging, and data-acquisition systems.
• Define test objectives, hazards, instrumentation, trigger logic, sampling rates, acceptance criteria, and stop conditions.
• Analyze electrical, thermal, pressure, gas, flame, ejecta, and propagation behavior and deliver correlation-ready datasets.
• Write test plans, procedures, reports, nonconformance records, root-cause assessments, and design recommendations while coordinating with design, simulation, EHS, facilities, fire-safety teams, and external laboratories.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in mechanical, aerospace, electrical, chemical engineering, materials science, or a related technical field.
• At least three years of hands-on battery, environmental, abuse, reliability, or aerospace hardware testing experience.
• Experience designing instrumented tests and selecting thermocouples, voltage and current measurement systems, pressure sensors, thermal imaging, and data-acquisition hardware.
• Working knowledge of lithium-ion battery hazards, high-voltage safety, stored energy, fire risk, and safe laboratory operations.
• Experience developing test fixtures, procedures, hazard controls, and technical reports, with the ability to troubleshoot laboratory hardware, instrumentation, wiring, communications, and data-quality issues.
• Ability to work on-site in Palo Alto and safely perform hands-on test setup and execution.

Nice to have

• Experience with thermal-runaway, propagation, overcharge, external heating, short-circuit, crush, or penetration testing.
• Experience with environmental chambers, vibration, thermal cycling, altitude, shock testing, and high-power battery or cell cyclers.
• Experience with electric aircraft, electric vehicles, UAVs, aerospace, defense, or other safety-critical energy systems.
• Familiarity with UN 38.3 and relevant battery or aerospace environmental-test standards.
• Experience with LabVIEW, Python, MATLAB, Dewesoft, NI hardware, fire-safe test cells, gas handling, remote monitoring, or outside laboratory management.

Culture & Benefits

• Safety is embedded in daily work through hazard identification, readiness reviews, emergency planning, and continuous improvement.
• Hands-on laboratory work emphasizes disciplined test execution, configuration control, calibrated instrumentation, and data traceability.
• Cross-functional collaboration supports design learning from unexpected results and test failures.
• Work involves coordination with EHS, facilities, fire-safety teams, simulation and design engineers, suppliers, and external laboratories.