Director of Systems Engineering R&D

ON.energyis setting the standard for large load interconnection. ON’s patented AI UPS™ is a medium-voltage UPS that serves as a firewall, protecting the data center from the grid, and the grid from the data center.With multiple gigawatts currently under construction, we are enabling grid-safe data centers.

Job Description: Director of Systems Engineering, R&D

Role Objective

• Lead ON.energy’s Systems Engineering team and the practices that translate product strategy, customer needs, grid requirements, and technology opportunities into complete, verifiable system solutions.
• Establish practical systems engineering governance across product architecture, requirements, interfaces, technical risk, verification, qualification, and design transfer.
• Build team capability and technical ownership for grid-scale energy storage, power conversion, UPS, and advanced power quality products from concept through field deployment.

Team Leadership and Capability

• Lead, coach, and develop Systems Engineers; define roles, ownership, capability gaps, hiring priorities, and workload balance across active product and customer programs.
• Set objectives, provide feedback, support performance management, and build the technical depth required for ON.energy’s product roadmap.
• Act as product lead engineering interface to sales, sales engineering, and project engineering

Systems Engineering Practice and Governance

• Define and improve the lifecycle for concept definition, requirements, architecture, interfaces, design reviews, technical risk, verification planning, configuration control, and design transfer.
• Establish practical templates, tools, review criteria, decision records, interface documents, and evidence expectations without creating unnecessary process burden.

Product Architecture and Technical Direction

• Guide system architectures for grid-scale energy storage, power conversion, UPS, and advanced power quality products across performance, safety, controls, protection, thermal, mechanical, cybersecurity, serviceability, and lifecycle requirements.
• Assign design authorities, resolve cross-disciplinary conflicts, and ensure structured trade studies covering performance, cost, schedule, manufacturability, supplier capability, reliability, and product risk.
• Document major technical decisions, assumptions, constraints, and rationale in a way that can be reused across future programs.

Requirements, Interfaces, and Risk

• Ensure requirements are complete, testable, traceable, and aligned with product strategy, customer commitments, regulations, grid codes, and standards.
• Oversee disciplined flow-down to subsystems, components, software, controls, verification, and release criteria.
• Establish management of electrical, mechanical, thermal, controls, communications, and operational interfaces across internal teams, suppliers, customer systems, and project applications.
• Maintain technical risk visibility across the product portfolio and drive early retirement through modeling, prototyping, supplier testing, design reviews, and root-cause investigations.

Verification, Qualification, and Product Execution

• Direct system-level verification and validation linking requirements to analysis, simulation, inspection, hardware testing, and field evidence.
• Define acceptance criteria, evidence plans, review readiness, and qualification strategy early in the product lifecycle.
• Coordinate qualification across laboratory, factory, national lab, supplier, and field environments.
• Align product intent, technical scope, schedules, and release criteria with Product Management, Program Management, discipline engineering, Supply Chain, Operations, Deployment, and Service.
• Set expectations for supplier technical deliverables, reviews, interface compliance, and qualification evidence; ensure validated designs transition effectively into manufacturing, commissioning, and service.

Stakeholder Communication

• Present architecture, decisions, risk, requirements maturity, verification status, interface dependencies, and review readiness clearly to leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Coordinate communications and engineering efforts across integrated product teams of disciplinary subject matter experts and product managers who report into other functional leaders
• Represent Systems Engineering in strategic customer, partner, supplier, standards, and technical due diligence discussions.

Experience and Requirements

• B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a closely related field; M.S. or Ph.D. preferred.
• 12+ years in complex power, energy, industrial, or electromechanical product de