Staff Systems Engineer

About the Company

VoltForce is partnering with an early-stage materials-inspection company to find a Staff Systems Engineer. The client helps manufacturers produce better, safer, and more reliable micro- and nano-scale materials, critical to sectors like energy storage, semiconductors, aerospace, and power systems. As manufacturing complexity and speed increase, undetected variations lead to waste, lower performance, higher costs, and safety risks. The company’s platform addresses this by non-destructively probing materials during production, combining a novel sensing approach with physics-informed machine learning to capture real-time signals inaccessible to conventional techniques. This provides manufacturers with rare visibility into material behavior during production, turning hidden data into actionable intelligence to reduce variability and improve yield and performance. The platform can operate as a standalone tool or integrate directly into production lines, is already in early deployment with leading global manufacturers, and the first commercial product is forthcoming.

About the Role

The client seeks a Staff Systems Engineer to define, integrate, and validate the company’s sensing platform for deployment in advanced manufacturing environments. As an early team member, you will shape system-level behavior and ensure technical coherence across hardware, software, and experimental domains, establishing a scalable technical foundation. This role involves both system-level technical ownership and shaping documentation practices for experiments, system designs, interfaces, and technical decisions to ensure clarity, consistency, and traceability as the company grows. The ideal candidate applies systems engineering judgment to complex, cross-disciplinary problems and is comfortable operating in ambiguous environments. You will drive system-level trade studies, guide experimental strategy, and resolve integration and performance issues while remaining hands-on in technical execution.

Responsibilities

• Define and own system-level architecture, integration, and validation of the company’s sensing platform.
• Guide system-level technical decisions through experimentation, data analysis, and cross-disciplinary evaluation.
• Lead investigation and resolution of complex system performance issues via structured experimentation, data analysis, and root cause analysis.
• Establish and evolve documentation structures for experiments, system designs, interfaces, and technical decisions across the organization.
• Ensure technical documentation is clear, consistent, traceable, and tightly integrated with hands-on engineering and validation activities.
• Collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams to guide system integration and resolve non-trivial cross-disciplinary issues.
• Incorporate customer and application feedback into system-level design evolution and validation strategy.
• Support on-site installation, validation, and system upgrade activities at customer sites as needed.

Domestic and international travel of approximately 10 to 15 percent is expected.

Requirements

• B.S. in Engineering or Physics with 7+ years of relevant industry experience, M.S. with 5+ years, or Ph.D. with 3+ years of hands-on systems experience.
• Experience developing automated metrology, inspection, or diagnostic systems across system definition, integration, validation, deployment, and customer support.
• Experience working in early-stage or ambiguous R&D environments, using experimentation and data analysis to evaluate concepts and guide system-level decisions.
• Proficiency with tools such as Python, MATLAB, C, LabVIEW, or similar for data analysis, modeling, and evaluation of system performance.
• Extensive hands-on experience developing, integrating, and validating prototypes, subsystems, and complete systems.
• Experience working across mechanical, electrical, software, and experimental domains to resolve complex integration and performance issues.
• Demonstrated ability to guide technical direction through experimentation, data-driven analysis, and cross-disciplinary evaluation.
• Experience establishing or evolving technical documentation practices to ensure clarity, consistency, and traceability of experimental results and system decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly in documenting complex technical work for diverse audiences.

Nice to Have

• Experience with manufacturing metrology equipment and sensors used for characterization or fabrication of advanced materials.
• Experience with requirements and test management tools (e.g., Jama) and data analysis software such as JMP.
• Experience with early-stage R&D and/or new product introduction (NPI) in complex technical systems.
• Exposure to high-precision, high-throughput industrial systems for material handling, metrology, or process automation.
• Prior work or research experience in key industrial markets such as batteries, semiconductors, power generation, energy, or electronics.
• Familiarity with high-voltage devices and novel sensing hardware.
• Experience with capital equipment designed for integration into manufacturing environments, particularly roll-to-roll and piece-to-piece processes.