Redwood Materials is an American clean energy company headquartered in Sparks, Nevada, focused on securing domestic supplies of critical battery materials and providing large-scale energy storage solutions. The company recycles end-of-life batteries to recover lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper, creating one of the largest domestic sources of these critical minerals in the United States. Its operations support the broader transition away from reliance on foreign supply chains for materials essential to electric vehicles and energy storage systems. Through its Redwood Energy division, the company designs, integrates, and deploys large-scale energy storage systems for data centers and the national grid, utilizing both new and repurposed batteries to deliver cost-effective solutions. Redwood Materials partners with major automotive, technology, and energy companies including Volkswagen Group of America, Panasonic, GM Ultium Cells, Toyota, BMW, Amazon, Volvo, and Southern Company, reflecting its central role in the emerging domestic battery supply chain. Founded by former Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, Redwood Materials was established with the mission of building a circular economy for batteries, reducing waste, lowering the carbon footprint of energy storage, and strengthening American energy independence. The company holds ISO 45001 and ISO 14001 certifications, underscoring its commitment to occupational health, safety, and environmental management standards.
About Redwood Materials
Redwood is localizing a global battery supply chain that seamlessly integrates recovery, reuse, and recycling — keeping critical minerals in circulation and driving the energy transition. Founded in 2017, we’re delivering low-cost and large-scale energy storage and producing battery materials in the U.S. for the first time, all from batteries we already have.
Abuse Test Engineer, Energy Storage
Essential Duties:
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.
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.
Responsibilities Will include:
- 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
- Designing, executing, and analyzing tests that simulate extreme conditions and misuse scenarios to ensure the safety of our new product
- 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
Desired Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree in physics, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field
- Strong understanding of physics and the physics of failure
- Proven experience with abuse tests, specifically UL9540a and related thermal propagation testing
- 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
The position is full-time. Compensation will be commensurate with experience.
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