About the role
About American Turbines
The power grid was built for a world that no longer exists. Centralized generation, hundred-mile transmission lines, decade-long permitting cycles. Meanwhile, demand is exploding: AI data centers, industrial electrification, remote operations that need megawatts yesterday and can't wait for utilities to catch up.
American Turbines is designing small modular gas turbines, purpose-built for distributed power generation. Machines designed from a blank sheet to be manufactured at scale, clustered in arrays. Hundreds of units operating in parallel, dynamically matching load like a compute cluster matches demand. We are a seed-stage company backed by the investors behind SpaceX, Boom Supersonic, and Hadrian.
About the Role
The Power Electronics Engineer owns everything between the generator shaft and the customer's 800 VDC bus, on our own turbine and on the machines we install at customer sites.
On the prototype, that means the power stage for American Turbines' first turbine: converting a variable-speed generator's output into 800 VDC and making every electrical component choice along the way. You will design the power stage, select and procure the components, and get it running alongside a live turbine on the test rig, working through real constraints: thermal limits, fast load transients, and a system that has to hold up over hundreds of hours of testing, not just a bench demo. You'll work closely with the Controls Engineer on the telemetry and sensing handoff between the power stage and the embedded controls.
On deployment, that means converting the output of the microturbines we bring on-site into the DC our first site requires: designing, procuring, and installing every piece of power electronics between the turbines and the DC bus bar we connect into. You'll be based in San Francisco, but plan on stretches of weeks on-site during installation and commissioning, not just the occasional trip.
Some blocks you'll design yourself, schematic through layout, magnetics, thermal, and EMC. Others come from partners and suppliers; you'll write the specs, qualify the hardware, and make it work in our system.
This is not a role where the design ships and someone else tests or installs it. You will be present for testing and on-site for commissioning, accountable for the interface working end to end, and iterating from what you see.
What We're Looking For
Experience designing and deploying power conversion at real power levels: DC-DC, inverters, rectifiers, motor drives, grid-tie, AC-to-DC. The EV industry is a natural home: traction inverters, 800 V platforms, DC fast charging. Hands-on work with wide-bandgap semiconductors, SiC and GaN. You've taken at least one converter from schematic through layout, magnetics, thermal, and EMC to working hardware, and ideally through a commissioned installation.
You're comfortable working when the electrical architecture isn't fully specified yet, and you can reason from first principles about tradeoffs like direct-drive vs. geared, or motoring-capable vs. separate starter, not just execute against a fixed spec. You understand the tradeoffs between efficiency, thermal margin, and component cost, and you can make a call under time pressure.
You're comfortable on the bench and in the field: bring-up, debug, instrumentation, and the discipline to find root cause instead of swapping parts until it works. You think about installation and serviceability as part of the design, not an afterthought.
Nice to have: exposure to electric machines, and control systems experience from converter control loops to embedded platforms.
Compensation
$130,000 to $180,000 base.
Generous stock package.
Medical, vision, and dental care.
2% matching on 401(k).