Director of Electrical - Power Distribution

Location: Torrance, California, United States. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States as a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

Salary: $225,000–$290,000 USD per year.

Company

hirify.global develops scalable, high-temperature nuclear power systems, including a pilot plant in Orangeville, Utah, for industrial, hydrogen, and advanced manufacturing applications.

What you will do

• Build and lead the in-house Power Distribution engineering organization, including hiring, organizational design, technical standards, budget, headcount, and engineering tools.
• Own the electrical architecture of islanded multi-gigawatt microgrids from generator terminals to customer meters, including voltage levels, topology, redundancy, and phased expansion.
• Engineer generator step-up transformers, medium-voltage collector systems, HV/EHV switchyards, transmission systems, substations, protection, and relaying through design, testing, and energization.
• Own power system studies covering load flow, short circuit, protection coordination, arc flash, insulation coordination, harmonics, motor starting, grounding, transient and small-signal stability, EMT, load rejection, cascading failures, restoration, and black start.
• Define protection, power quality, reliability, generator control, governor, excitation, microgrid control, dispatch, and customer-interface requirements.
• Coordinate with reactor, nuclear safety, automation and controls, OT, construction, procurement, and customer engineering teams on auxiliary power, load growth, equipment standards, commissioning, and supply chain risk.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering with a power systems focus.
• 15+ years of power systems engineering experience in utility, generation, transmission, or large industrial power systems, including 7+ years leading engineering teams.
• Deep expertise in power system analysis, including load flow, short circuit, protection coordination, and dynamic stability, with hands-on experience using ETAP, PSS/E, PSCAD, PowerFactory, or equivalent tools.
• Experience architecting and delivering HV/EHV substations, switchyards, and transmission or large collector systems from concept through energization.
• Strong command of protection and relaying philosophy, relay settings, and protection system design for generators, transformers, lines, and buses.
• Experience with large generation interconnection, generator controls, and frequency and voltage control behavior.
• Proven ability to build teams from the ground up, hire strong engineers, and deliver on aggressive schedules.

Nice to have

• Professional Engineer (PE) license or eligibility.
• Experience designing islanded, weak-grid, or microgrid power systems, including low-inertia and high-load-step stability challenges.
• Experience serving large data center or other large dynamic loads, including power quality and ride-through requirements.
• Experience with EMT modeling of inverter-based resources or large power electronic loads.
• Experience with standardized, repeatable substation designs and serial deployment programs.
• Experience in startup or rapid-growth environments, ideally on the owner or developer side.

Culture & Benefits

• High-impact startup environment with significant ownership, autonomy, and opportunities for rapid career growth.
• Competitive base salary and equity ownership.
• Comprehensive medical benefits and unlimited PTO.
• Free daily lunch and dinner provided onsite, plus a generous PPE stipend.
• Direct collaboration with experienced operators, engineers, and industry leaders while building transformative energy technology.