Senior Electronics Engineer

Spring is a nonprofit venture platform building and backing companies that improve animal welfare at scale.
Spring Works, Spring's in-house technology group, designs, prototypes, and welfare-validates the devices the ecosystem needs but no vendor supplies. These technologies are then handed off to our incubated companies for deployment.
The equipment you build is the foundation of better welfare for billions of animals. These machines will be placed on farms, at fisheries, at aquaculture sites, in land-based processing plants, and on boats at sea. Equipment you might work on includes stunning systems for fish and crustaceans, aquaculture water quality and actuation systems, and farm robots, with new categories added as the ecosystem presents a need.
Spring Works products have to run reliably in wet, corrosive, moving environments, often thousands of miles from our shop. Some will run standalone and others in conjunction with equipment already on site. They have to be safe for the people operating them, who may have had minimal training. We design in remote diagnostics and instrumentation from the start. What we hand over to an incubated company is a field-deployable prototype, built to survive real production conditions and to return evidence of how it performed.
We're hiring a Senior Electronics Engineer to own the high-voltage electronics on the equipment we build, starting with our electrical stunning systems, with room to take on lower-voltage machine electronics if that's in your background. These run at tens to hundreds of kW, in water, with operators working beside them every shift. You'll take that hardware through every step of the project lifecycle: concept, architecture, component specification and sourcing, build, test and debug, and shipment to the customer facility. You'll be hands-on, building and testing the hardware yourself in our lab.
You'll be Spring Works' domain expert in high voltage, and the person the rest of the team checks with before anything high-power gets switched on. You will dictate how our systems are tested safely, deployed safely, and operate safely at the customer site. You should be able to operate without oversight from management, know when to get input and when to make the call yourself, and work closely with the mechanical, controls and mechatronics engineers on the team. Stunning is our first device family.
What you'll doHigh-Voltage Design OwnershipOwn the high-voltage power architecture from concept through release: how mains power gets converted, switched, delivered, protected and distributed for each application.Specify, source and integrate the hardware that does it: transformers, power supply modules, switching modules, capacitors, contactors, fusing, and current and voltage sensing. Evaluate vendor parts against our requirements and qualify them before they go into a machine.Run the analysis behind your decisions: loss and thermal budgets, fault and short-circuit cases, and insulation coordination. Work with our welfare team on how output holds up as the load changes with environmental variables.Produce complete documentation: wiring diagrams, schematics, BOMs, test procedures and operating manuals.Work with the senior mechanical engineer on enclosures, cable routing, cooling and service access, and with the controls engineer on I/O, interlocks and the interface between the power stage and the control system.Support installation, site acceptance and field issues at customer facilities as needed.Safety and ComplianceOwn the electrical safety case for every high-voltage system we build: isolation, grounding and bonding, ground-fault and leakage detection, interlocks, emergency stops, discharge circuits, and safe states on fault.Design for wet, washdown and corrosive environments, choosing ingress protection, conformal coating, connectors and cabling that survive a farm or a boat deck.Design to the relevant UL, IEC, NEC (NFPA 70) and NFPA 79 requirements, and prepare hardware for third-party certification when a product needs it.Run DFMEA and fault-tree analysis on the power system.Set up and run our HV test area: lockout/tagout, PPE, test equipment, and the rules for who works on energized equipment and how (NFPA 70E or equivalent).Prototyping, Test and DebugBring up and commission your own prototypes, from first power-on through full-load operation.Validate designs on the bench and at full load with oscilloscopes, HV differential and current probes, power analyzers, hipot and insulation testers, and electronic loads.Instrument the power stage so we can see what it's doing in the field, working with the firmware side on what gets logged and reported.Diagnose field failures and turn them into design changes.Low-Voltage Systems and SourcingWhere you have the background, help scope the low-voltage (5-24V) side of the machine: microcontrollers, sensors, motors, actuators and the supplies that feed them.Work with vendors and contract manufacturers on quoting, DFM feedback, lead times and qualification for electrical components and PCBAs.Own the electrical BOM and revision control for the systems you design.Raise the bar around youLead and participate in design reviews. Present your design decisions in an unbiased way and always be open to feedback and new ideas.Set the electrical standards the rest of the team designs to, including schematic conventions, wire and part numbering, library parts, and reusable power and protection blocks.Teach the team how to work safely around high voltage/high power.Be willing to lead improvements and set up systems that don't exist yet within the company.Be a credible technical voice in customer design reviews and with certifiers when needed.

What we're looking forRequiredBS in Electrical Engineering or equivalent demonstrated experience.5+ years designing and bringing up high-voltage, high-power electronics. We're looking for hands-on design work in the hundreds of volts and tens to hundreds of kilowatts.Experience designing HV systems that people handle and work around every day, such as EV chargers, solar inverters and battery storage, smart electrical panels, battery packs, or electric heavy equipment. Equipment people plug in, touch and service counts for more here than a power supply sealed inside a cabinet.Demonstrated ownership of a high-voltage system or major subsystem from concept through field deployment or production.Experience specifying and integrating HV power hardware into equipment: transformers, power supplies, switching modules, contactors and protection.Enough power electronics depth to evaluate and specify HV supplies and modules, and to recognize when off-the-shelf won't do the job.Hands-on HV safety practice: isolation, creepage and clearance, grounding, fault protection, and safe work on energized systems (NFPA 70E or equivalent training). Double points for safety in a wet environment.Has set up or run HV safety procedures: lockout/tagout, energized-work rules and test area controls.Working knowledge of UL and IEC safety standards and what it takes to get a product certified.Hands-on lab and test skills, with examples of HV hardware you've brought up and tested yourself.Comfortable reading mechanical drawings and working with mechanical and controls engineers on packaging, thermal and interfaces.Willing to be on-site and on the floor. This is not a remote role.Comfortable in a working shop, able to lift 50 lbs and stand for extended periods of time.
Nice to haveLow-voltage design and component scoping (5-24V): microcontroller boards, sensors, motors and drives, and actuators in equipment or automation settings.Embedded or firmware experience on microcontroller-class hardware (ESP32, STM32, Raspberry Pi or similar), and comms such as CAN, Modbus, SPI and I2C.Schematic capture and PCB design in Altium, OrCAD, KiCad or similar, plus circuit simulation in LTspice, PLECS, MATLAB/Simulink or similar.Hands-on wiring and panel building: soldering, crimping, harness building and UL 508A control panels.Electrical CAD for harnesses and panels (SolidWorks Electrical, EPLAN, AutoCAD Electrical), or MCAD for packaging electronics into enclosures.Pulsed power, capacitor banks, or delivering high energy from a limited supply.Electrical stunning, electrofishing, defibrillation, or other systems that deliver controlled current into water or living tissue.Experience with equipment designed for wet environments, or for agricultural, animal or food processing.EMC testing (IEC 61000-4-x).Automation equipment or custom machine building experience.Time at a startup or small hardware team where you owned the electrical side end to end.
Role detailsReports to Director of EngineeringWork location Berkeley, CA (San Francisco Bay Area). This is an in-person role.Travel Some domestic and international travel may be required for field deployments.
Spring is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, sex, pregnancy, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military or veteran status, reproductive health decision-making, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.