Natron Energy seeks a dynamic VP of Product Engineering who will build and lead the company’s Product and Engineering teams with full responsibility and accountability for product strategy/roadmap, design, new product introduction (NPI), and design for manufacturing (DFM). This person will take on an existing engineering team of 20 engineers working on site in Santa Clara, CA and will build and structure that team to lead product development, launch, and handoff to Operations. The VP product will guide design and DFM of Natron Energy’s two existing product lines, and will also be responsible for owning product strategy/roadmap for new products serving data center, EV fast charging, commercial aviation, and other industrial power markets. These products will include modular low and high voltage battery solutions that include both hardware and software components.
A key focus area for this role will be building and strengthening the engineering team to fully resource and practice design/prototyping, NPI, and DFM while collaborating with Operations and Sales to achieve successful product launches and production ramps. Qualified candidates have significant prior experience building and leading engineering teams for full-stack platforms that include integrated hardware and software components, as well as significant technical experience in batteries, energy storage, or related devices.
The successful candidate will have the commercial drive and determination to design, build, and launch great product, maintaining a culture of can-do innovation while building the team that will be the heart of a future multi-$Billion company.
The ideal VP Product Engineering must demonstrate the following competencies:
Driving Commercial Outcomes (Opens up new commercial options for the company that drive profitability)
• Identify, define, understand, and execute on new product opportunities and build a cohesive long-term product roadmap based on customer and strategic partner inputs
• Understand product platform profit centers and successfully translate them into the appropriate tradeoffs in product design (performance, cost, etc.).
• Lead and support product engineering across the full lifecycle, including handoff to Operations and Sales
• Drives and encourages team behaviors in which innovation is focused on solving the right problems to deliver successful business outcomes
Executes Strategy (Leads execution of organizational strategy)
· Understand company-wide objectives, technology capabilities and limitations, and customer/supply chain requirements to create and lead the execution of a product roadmap
· Translate that product roadmap into an actionable full-cycle development schedule for new and existing products
· Identifies multiple possible future scenarios for the organization and develops a range of bets that align with each scenario while maintaining focus on core objectives and outcomes
· Gets to the heart of complex issues in order to shape strategic assumptions, define the purpose for the whole product organization, and then drive product/engineering results that positively enable sales and operations
· Initiates disruptive or differentiating moves that have a valuable impact on entire organization
· Determines value and potential impact of strategic actions on the entire organization as key input into decisions
· Initiates processes and practices that enable all parts of the business to have a voice in strategic dialogue
Delivering Results (substantially redesigns and leads business practices to deliver breakthrough results)
· Seals the deal: drives team and adjacent stakeholders across the finish line to reach critical milestones despite resource and time constraints
· Introduces substantial improvements to enhance business performance
· Brings in or creates new solutions, business opportunities or methods which can be measured by significant improvements to design, engineering, manufacturing processes, and/or revenue generation from the product
· Identifies and examines alternatives, which include evaluating costs, risks, and benefits for the organization
· Ensures the organization works smarter not just harder, and role models high performance
Leading Teams (Motivates and inspires diverse, high-performance teams enabling openness and innovation)
· Creates a team spirit of excitement and positive motivation where people feel emotionally committed to the company’s mission and team
· Encourages the team to identify initiatives beyond original and own mandate; sees own role as enabler of others
· Binds people together across multiple teams into a common and inspiring purpose; develops diverse followership across the organization
· Well calibrated understanding of when to build organizations and delegate vs. get involved in the day-to-day details
· Is unafraid of showing vulnerability and is authentic
· Makes team growth an organization-wide priority
· Builds the capabilities and confidence of teams to approach tasks through transformation, agility and ambiguity
Key Accountabilities:
- Lead all aspects of Product and Engineering for Natron Energy’s energy storage products.
- Set, drive, and deliver on a product roadmap that includes a cross-functional stage-gate process for product development, launch, and handoff to Sales/Operations.
- Own system level architecture and engineering (everything outside of the battery cells).
- Own COGS; collaborate closely with Finance and Operations to meet cost targets through successful DFM.
- Collaborate with Operations to define manufacturing automation equipment; ensure product designs enable fully automated manufacturing.
- With Operations, develop, lead, and support contract manufacturing relationships on a timeline consistent with the product launch / ramp schedule.
- Build engineering team from initial headcount of 20 to a fully resourced organization capable of developing and launching multiple full-stack energy storage products.
- Build product management / product strategy organization from scratch; while leading that team, define and execute a product roadmap.
Required Experience:
- Minimum 15 years-experience building and leading Product and Engineering organizations of 25-50+ headcount for a power electronics hardware/full stack platform
- Minimum 15 year-experience in batteries, energy storage, or related technologies with technical proficiency in engineering disciplines such as mechanical, thermal, electrical, and systems engineering
- Experience in total lifecycle product ownership for 48V and/or 480-1000V power electronics products: initial design/prototyping, NPI to manufacturing partners, and ongoing DFM in collaboration with CMs/operations groups
- Strong understanding of the underlying design concepts for battery systems or analogous electronic hardware/software systems, with an ability to make design tradeoffs between functionality, features, cost, scalability, and time-to-market
- Experience building and leading engineering teams for full-stack platforms that include integrated hardware and software components, as well as significant technical experience in batteries, energy storage, or related devices.
- Excellent verbal, written, and presentation skills, capable of publicly representing the company to customers and manufacturing partners
- Bachelors, Masters, and/or PhD in a relevant engineering field: mechanical, thermal, electrical, etc.
Preferred Experience:
- Leadership in a high growth/start-up environment
- Experience developing a product roadmap and launching hardware products that are manufactured at global scale: 10,000 – 1,000,000+ units
- Industry experience in power electronics systems and energy storage
Compensation/Pay Transparency
- Disclaimer: The actual salary of a successful applicant may vary from posted ranges based on the candidate’s experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, internal equity and alignment with market data, and other legitimate business reasons, including, but not limited to, compliance with applicable immigration law prevailing wages.
- In addition, Natron Energy has a strong benefits package including Medical, Dental, Vision, 401k Plan, Life Insurance, and Flexible Time Off and Personal Time Off for Exempt and Non-Exempt employees respectively.
- The salary range for this position is a minimum of $227,500 and a maximum of $300,000.
- Exact title will be determined based on experience and skill
About Us:
Natron Energy (
natron.energy) is the future of energy storage. Natron Energy’s battery products solve operations performance and reliability problems for the world’s biggest electricity customers. Natron Energy’s initial products target markets exceeding $25B including data centers, oil & gas, EV fast charging, and commercial aviation. Natron Energy has additional products in development for >$50B markets including commercial and residential grid storage. Its products are based on sodium-ion cells containing Prussian blue electrodes that deliver unique power, cycle life, and safety: full discharge and recharge in just minutes and up to 50,000 deep discharge cycles from a nonflammable, fault tolerant system. Natron Energy’s current production is sold out for the next 12 months. The company has signed over $225M/year in master sales agreements and LOIs, and scale-up to mass production is now underway. Natron Energy has raised over $155M in venture capital investment to date, as well as $35M in non-dilutive funding to support its supply chain scale up. The company has a strong leadership team that includes world-class C and VP level strategy, sales, operations, and technology executives.
Quick Facts:
·Founded in 2012 as a Stanford spin out
·Now selling the world’s first UL certified Na-ion product in $9B data center market, with $700k shipped and $
1.5M booked
·First product (battery tray for in-rack power) is fully de-risked and sold out through Q1 2023
·Second product (ultra high-power battery rack services) launched in 2022
What differentiates Natron Energy from other battery companies?
Natron Energy solves the problems created by lead acid and lithium-ion technology:
· Higher power discharge and faster recharge
A smaller footprint for high power leaves more space to generate revenue
Fast recharge results in higher system uptime
· Industry leading service life
Tens-of-thousands of charge-discharge cycles enables real-time peak saving of volatile electrical loads
Predictable degradation without surprise failures
· Nonflammable
The only battery that cannot start a fire
Customers gain confidence and save on fire mitigation costs
Natron Energy is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at:
[email protected]
