Staff Electrical Engineer, Hardware Systems
Mainspring Energy
Other Engineering
Menlo Park, CA, USA
Posted on May 24, 2025
Company Overview
Mainspring Energy is revolutionizing power generation with the world’s most flexible and adaptable onsite power generator, the Mainspring Linear Generator. Commercial, industrial, and utility leaders are choosing Mainspring over traditional options like engines, turbines, and fuel cells to quickly and reliably deliver local power for EV charging, commercial facilities, data centers, and grid-scale operations. The Mainspring Linear Generator is fuel flexible, ramps up and down to meet demand, and utilizes a flameless technology with near-zero NOx emissions.
Backed by top-tier investors such as Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, American Electric Power, and Lightrock, Mainspring designs, manufactures and delivers its products to customers across the U.S. today, and we’re quickly scaling for international expansion.
Inspired by our vision of the affordable, reliable, net-zero carbon grid, Mainspring is rapidly expanding within the $816B global electricity equipment market, and we’re hiring the best talent to meet growing customer demand around the globe. We welcome a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and talents to bring fresh perspectives and ongoing innovation to our customers.
We are looking to build relationships with people who share our values:
Pragmatic Optimism. Building a new category of world-class power generation requires the optimism of ambition and creativity, balanced with practicality to solve problems efficiently. The challenges that arise are opportunities for growth.
Excellence without Ego. We bring expertise and commitment to creating the best customer experience, from sales to deployment and service, just as we apply deep technical rigor to building and delivering world-class products. We strive for excellence and behave as leaders with the humility to acknowledge our challenges, both collectively and as individual contributors.
Proactive Collaboration. The integration and cross-disciplinary nature of Mainspring’s business requires intentionally seeking out others who bring different skills, perspectives, and priorities. Our culture of inclusion and respect extends beyond our team to interactions with our partners and customers.
More information can be found at www.mainspringenergy.com
Job Overview
The technology that powers Mainspring’s Linear Generator is unlike any other generator technology on the market. The Linear Generator relies on innovative electrical power and control hardware systems to achieve its best-in-class efficiency while meeting the world’s strictest emissions requirements. These electrical hardware systems are designed by a talented team of electrical engineers that own hardware design from initial concept through test and manufacturing.
We have a technical leadership opportunity for an electrical engineer to shape the future of the Linear Generator’s electrical systems.
Responsibilities
- Design critical electrical systems that enable key functions and ever-expanding features of Mainspring’s linear generator
- Work on a wide variety of subsystems and components, including (in no particular order) high voltage batteries, grid-tie inverters, capacitor banks, motor drives, low and high voltage power distribution, safety controllers, and more
- Become an expert on the linear generator electrical system. This involves the hardware designs and the system-level controls that bring the hardware to life
- Be called upon to troubleshoot our most complex system-level problems, and be able to breakdown abstract system-level symptoms to be able to identify which subsystem is the cause of the problem
- Regularly blur the line between operating as an electrical design engineer and a systems engineer. This will involve activities such as defining electrical system requirements, allocating requirements to subsystems, analyzing trade-offs between subsystems, and leading the team to develop robust verification plans
- This is a hybrid position (onsite + remote) and will require you to be onsite as required to perform testing, troubleshooting, manufacturing support, etc.
Qualifications
- 7+ years of hands-on experience designing, developing, and realizing complex electrical systems
- An eagerness to work on a wide variety of assignments
- While you will spend more of your time working at the system-level, you have the technical expertise to dig into low-level aspects of electrical designs
- Technical leadership experience and experience leading a project team
- Experience defining system level requirements and creating verification plans
- A bachelor’s degree, or higher, in Electrical Engineering or related field
Nice-to-haves
- Experience in the full hardware development life cycle, from requirements development to manufacturing support; having taken at least one product through volume manufacturing
- Experience working at a startup or rapid development environment
Does your experience not meet all of our posted requirements? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to positions unless they meet every listed requirement. At Mainspring, we are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, flexible, and collaborative environment, so if you want to help us transition the world to clean and affordable electricity, and don’t meet all posted requirements for a particular role, we’d still love to hear from you. Mainspring can sometimes be flexible enough to shift responsibilities for the right person, or otherwise identify open or upcoming roles that may better fit your professional background.
In more traditional words, Mainspring Energy, Inc is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.
This compensation and benefits information is based on Mainspring Energy's estimate as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. We generally do not negotiate on salary once we have made an offer. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors that may include location, relevant prior experience and/or education, or particular skills and expertise. New hires joining the company tend to be paid within the starting base pay range noted above, with opportunities to increase pay over time based on development of additional skills, competencies, and company-specific knowledge.