Lead Materials Engineer, Electrical Insulation

WHAT TO EXPECT Heron Power is a startup company building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to de-bottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and less costly hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything. Our first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products over the past decade. We understand that no one individual knows everything. We will all learn a lot together and from each other. We strive to build a collaborative, enriching environment conducive to personal, technical, and career growth. You can expect to work in a dynamic environment, driven by first principles engineering, solving difficult problems—with a strong bias toward hands-on execution and learning by doing. JOB OVERVIEW Reliability at medium voltage is fundamental to whether our products can scale. A robust insulation system is often the difference between a promising prototype and hardware that performs in the field for decades. The grid cannot scale without more capable and more reliable power conversion hardware. Insulation systems are foundational to that reliability. In this role, you will help define the material and process backbone behind products that must perform under demanding electrical and thermal conditions for decades in the field. As the Lead Materials Engineer, Electrical Insulation, you will own the development, qualification, and manufacturing readiness of insulation systems used in our medium-voltage power conversion products. You will work across materials, interfaces, geometry, and process to ensure our designs meet electrical, thermal, mechanical, and production requirements simultaneously. This role spans dielectric materials, bonding systems, encapsulation, coatings, molding, potting, and composite insulation assemblies. You will define how we evaluate materials, how we qualify them, how we investigate failures, and how we translate first-principles understanding into robust, manufacturable hardware. This is a role for someone who can connect electric field stress, thermal cycling, material behavior, manufacturing process, and long-term reliability into one engineering problem—and solve it. HOW YOU WILL CONTRIBUTE - Develop and qualify insulation systems for high-power-density, medium-voltage power electronics intended for scale production - Define material selection criteria, screening methods, and qualification plans for dielectric materials, interfaces, and insulation assemblies - Characterize and evaluate dielectric strength, partial discharge behavior, dielectric loss, thermal performance, adhesion, environmental robustness, and long-term aging behavior - Lead technical investigations into insulation-related failure modes including partial discharge, breakdown, delamination, voiding, treeing, tracking, contamination, and thermomechanical degradation - Drive design decisions across materials, interfaces, creepage and clearance strategy, field management, and process selection to improve product reliability and manufacturability - Develop robust processes for potting, molding, encapsulation, coating, and assembly in partnership with Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality, and Supply Chain - Support DFMEA and PFMEA activities by identifying key insulation-related design and process risks and driving mitigation plans - Partner with test and reliability teams to define accelerated test methods, interpret results, and close the loop between failure analysis and design improvement - Help establish internal standards, design rules, and validation approaches for insulation systems as Heron scales its product platform WHAT YOU BRING We value strong fundamentals, practical engineering judgment, curiosity, a