Principal Systems Engineer, R&D

Responsibilities

• Product Concept Origination
• Concept Documentation: Author concept proposals that articulate the technical approach, target specifications, competitive differentiation, key risks, and resource estimates. Present concepts to R&D leadership and cross-functional stakeholders for stage-gate review.
• Requirements Development and Management
• System Requirements Authoring: Develop and maintain system-level requirements documents that capture functional, performance, environmental, safety, and regulatory requirements for new products. Ensure requirements are traceable, testable, and aligned with customer and grid code obligations.
• Requirements Flow-Down: Decompose system requirements into subsystem and component specifications. Coordinate with discipline engineers to ensure consistent interpretation and compliance.
• Preliminary Design Leadership
• Prototyping and Early Validation: Plan and oversee prototyping activities to retire key technical risks early in the design cycle. Define prototype scope, success criteria, and test plans. Coordinate rapid-build efforts across hardware, firmware, and test teams.
• Design Reviews: Organize and lead preliminary design reviews (PDRs).
• Supply Vendor Engineering Coordination
• Vendor Technical Interface: Serve as the primary engineering point of contact with component and subsystem vendors. Communicate technical requirements, review vendor design proposals, and negotiate specification compliance.
• Vendor Qualification and Selection: Lead technical evaluation of prospective vendors through design audits, capability assessments, and prototype sample testing. Provide engineering input to make/buy decisions and vendor selection trade studies.
• Supply Chain De-Risking: Align early stage reviews of supplier readiness with supply chain team.
• Qualitative Decision-Making and Trade Studies
• Structured Trade Analysis: Design and facilitate trade studies that weigh product success criteria.
• Risk-Informed Prioritization: Maintain a living technical risk register for each product development program. Prioritize risk-retirement activities based on consequence and likelihood, and ensure mitigation plans are resourced and tracked.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Facilitate decision-making across engineering, product management, operations, and supply chain stakeholders.
• Productization Support
• Design Transfer: Support the transition of validated designs from R&D into product engineering.
• Production Issue Resolution: Provide systems-level engineering support during initial product deployment. Triage integration and commissioning issues, lead root-cause investigations,

Additional Information

ON.energy is building the power infrastructure that makes the AI era possible. As AI demand surges past what the grid and traditional data centers can support, ON.energy provides a new class of power technology proven at gigawatt scale and trusted by the world's leading cloud and AI companies. Our systems are already deployed across 2.5 GW of hyper-scale campuses, validated by top U.S. national labs, and certified for grid-safe operation by major utilities. With real products in the field, we're scaling faster than the grid can, transforming power from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage for the companies building the future. Role Objective The Principal Systems Engineer will serve as a technical originator and design authority for new ON.energy products. This role is responsible for identifying and shaping new product concepts, leading engineering teams through preliminary design, and supporting the transition from prototype to full productization. The Principal Systems Engineer will own requirements development, drive early-stage prototyping, coordinate with supply vendors on component engineering, and apply structured qualitative decision-making to navigate the trade-offs inherent in grid-scale energy storage system design. Residing within the R&D team, this position ensures that ON.energy's product pipeline is grounded in sound, agile systems engineering practice.

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