About the Role 

Whisper Aero is seeking a skilled and motivated power electronics engineer to lead the design, prototyping, and validation of efficient and power dense power electronics / motor controllers.

The ideal candidate will work closely with Whisper Aero’s Powertrain Lead and the Thermal Management Lead to define requirements for the motor controller and identify an optimal controller topology. The candidate will be responsible for performing design optimization of the controller, sourcing PCBs and components for prototyping, and validating the design performance via hardware testing. As a part of a lean engineering team, the candidate may have opportunities to assist in other functional teams, including the ground test team and the flight test team.

What You’ll Do

• Lead Whisper Aero’s motor drive development efforts for electric propulsion systems towards productization
• Maintain awareness of emerging technologies in the field of power electronics and motor drives
• Perform high-level comparison of motor controller topologies and identify optimal topology for a given electric propulsor and its set of acoustic, performance, and SWaP-C constraints
• Design and optimize a motor controller for electric propulsion systems through modeling and simulation
• Lead design review processes and assess cost, risk, and schedule of the prototype build
• Prototype and validate hardware against design requirements
• Benchmark commercial off-the-shelf motor controllers for various applications

Basic Qualifications

• US Person
• B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering (or equivalent)
• Strong fundamentals of AC electric motor control and various PWM schemes
• Familiarity with sensorless and sensored motor control algorithms
• Expertise with PCB layout software (EAGLE, OrCAD, Altium, etc.) and implementation
• Expertise in SPICE
• Experience in: Embedded C, C , Java, Python, and/or MATLAB/Simulink
• Strong written and verbal communication for effective knowledge sharing

Bonus Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (or equivalent)
• Experience in the application of wide-bandgap semiconductors
• Experience with thermal modeling and design of power electronics
• Experience with DSP, FPGA, and microcontrollers
• Proficiency with CAN protocol
• Experience with software/hardware development in accordance with DO-278C and/or DO-254
• Private Pilot or Remote Pilot Certificate Holder