Test Systems Engineer - TAU

Power conversion is the bottleneck between the compute, energy, and mobility industries and the future they're trying to build. Most of the industry is still solving it with decades-old approaches. Tau is fixing that. We're a venture-backed hardtech company in Redwood City, building power conversion technology for data centers, EVs, and energy systems. Several products are already moving into production.

We hire people who own problems end-to-end: power electronics, embedded software, controls, test and validation, mechanical design. We solve from first principles, not legacy playbooks. We're past "promising technology." Customers are buying, volume is coming, and the people who join now set the standard everyone builds on after.

Who you are

You think in systems, and you build for reality. You'd rather ship the simplest reliable answer to an engineering question than the most sophisticated one. You know the difference between complexity that earns its keep and complexity for its own sake.

You default to structure without needing to be told to. You see a recurring issue and build the fix that prevents it from recurring, not just the fix for today. You document because someone else needs to be able to run this without you in the room, not because you were asked to.

You have real judgment about risk. You know when "good enough" is actually good enough, and when it isn't, and you're comfortable being the person who says so even when it's inconvenient. High-voltage safety, interlocks, fault handling: you don't treat these as boxes to check, you treat them as the reason the job matters.

You want ownership over a domain that's core to how the whole engineering org performs, and you want to be measured on the capability you build, not just the hours you put in.

Our Engineering Approach

Innovation shows what's possible. Disciplined engineering creates products. Creative ideas matter only when they become reliable, manufacturable products that solve customer problems

About the role

The lab is where every engineering claim gets checked against reality. If the data's untrustworthy, every downstream decision, design, program timeline, and customer commitment inherits that risk without anyone noticing until it's expensive.

This role owns that. You're responsible for the test infrastructure, the standards it runs on, and the judgment call on what's good enough to trust. You'll work across Mechanical, Power Electronics, Controls, Embedded Software, Manufacturing, and Program Management, and you'll have real authority to say a system isn't ready, a result isn't credible, or a process needs to change, and make that stick.