Lead Firmware Engineer - Power Conversion Control

The posting, as Proper Voltage wrote it

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About Proper Voltage
Proper Voltage is unlocking the next generation of battery technology across robotics, data centers, and defense.

We're building intelligent battery systems that make advanced chemistries (sodium-ion, lithium-titanate, lithium-silicon) work in products that were never designed for them. Humanoid robots can upgrade power systems without redesigning their entire platform. Data centers get safer, cheaper backup power. Drones and autonomous vehicles get higher energy density without lengthy integration cycles.

If you want to work on hard engineering problems that matter this is the place.

Job Overview
Proper Voltage designs and builds safety-critical battery energy storage systems. This role leads the real-time control firmware for our bidirectional DC/DC power conversion stage — the code that closes current and voltage loops on multiphase interleaved converters, arbitrates operating modes, and commands a safe state when a fault occurs.
This is not a general embedded role that happens to touch PWM. You will implement compensators within a sub-microsecond ISR budget with correct fixed-point scaling and correct ADC-to-PWM trigger phasing, then prove on the bench that the hardware does what the design says it should.
You will work as a pair with our Lead Controls Engineer – Power Electronics. They own what the loop should do and why; you own how it runs on the silicon. You know enough control theory to implement their design faithfully, push back when it costs more cycles than the budget allows, and tell them what the silicon actually delivers.
You will lead implementation within our portable, MCU-agnostic DC/DC control library.
What you'll do

• Real-time control loop implementation for four-switch buck-boost power stages and successor topologies, including multiphase interleaved operation and phase current balancing.
• Modules within the portable DC/DC control library: compensator implementations, mode arbitration, scheduler and ISR architecture, and the platform abstraction layer.
• Converter protection firmware — cycle-by-cycle current limit, overvoltage and undervoltage, thermal derating, gate-drive fault handling, and safe-state transitions.
• Implementation verification: evidence that firmware matches the control design, plus measured timing, jitter, and worst-case execution time.
• Firmware verification evidence supporting UL 1973, UL 1998, and UL 9540 certification.

Responsibilities

• Implement compensators and control loops in C from the controls engineer's specifications, to fixed cycle budgets using fixed-point or single-precision arithmetic as appropriate, with explicit saturation, anti-windup, and bumpless mode transfer.
• Verify each imple

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eference ecosystem — Digital Power Development Board, Digital Power Plug-In Modules, and the PowerSmart Digital Control Library Designer.

Additional preferred experience

• Bidirectional and multiphase interleaved converter control, including current sharing and phase balancing between paralleled phases.
• Average current mode control implementation specifically, as distinct from voltage mode or peak current mode.
• Wide-bandgap power stages (GaN, SiC) and the firmware-visible consequences of fast switching edges — sense chain noise, blanking, dead-time sensitivity, and gate-drive fault behavior.
• ARM Cortex-M devices with advanced timer peripherals in addition to dsPIC; we value portability across both architectures.
• Running firmware control code inside PLECS or MATLAB/Simulink (C-Script, DLL, or S-function blocks) for software-in-the-loop verification.
• Hands-on loop gain measurement with a network or frequency response analyzer.
• Battery energy storage, EV charging, photovoltaic inverter, or grid-interactive converter experience, including charge profile management and BMS interaction such as current limit negotiation, precharge, and contactor sequencing.
• Functional safety and certification exposure: IEC 61508 or ISO 26262 concepts, UL 1973, UL 1998, UL 9540, FMEA/FMEDA, and software safety requirements traceability.
• MISRA C, static analysis, on-target unit testing, and hardware- or processor-in-the-loop infrastructure.
• CAN and CANopen, and firmware update over an embedded bus.
• Contributions to reusable, portable control libraries with clean hardware abstraction, as opposed to one-off application firmware.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary range: $150,000 – $175,000 depending on experience and qualifications.
• Equity options as part of the compensation package.
• Comprehensive healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision).
• Generous paid time off and paid holidays (PTO) policy.

Ready to work on power systems that matter? Let's talk.