The board
Internship
Engineering
Intern, System Integration & Test Automation (Spring 2027)
Heron Power · Engineering
- Where
- Scotts Valley
- Posted
- May 11
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.
What you'd do
- Design and build electrical reliability test benches for power electronics hardware—inverters, DC/DC converters, bi-directional power stages.
- Specify, procure, and integrate lab equipment: programmable power supplies, electronic loads, DAQ systems, sensors, protection hardware, interlocks, and cabling.
- Own the bench system design: grounding, measurement integrity, EMI-aware instrumentation, protection strategy, safe operating procedures, and maintainability.
- Contribute to our software test infrastructure for system integration and reliability testing — test architecture, hardware abstraction layers, and result reporting pipelines.
- Write software tests that interact directly with hardware and firmware over CAN, UART, Modbus, TCP/IP — debugging signal integrity, protocol failures, and firmware edge cases.
- Write concurrent, fault-tolerant software for our next-generation manufacturing test platform: Firmware Flashing, FCT, EOL stations running autonomously on the factory floor.
- Build AI agents that manage test execution across facilities — initiating runs, monitoring anomalies, implementing test script and firmware changes in response to failures, and routing issues to humans
- Translate test goals and suspected failure mechanisms into test plans, stress profiles, instrumentation plans, and pass/fail criteria.
- Execute reliability campaigns—burn-in, power cycling, thermal stress, and abuse tests—and evolve them as we learn where the real failure cliffs are.
- Drive fast debug loops during excursions: isolate, instrument deeper, reproduce, and verify that corrective actions eliminate the failure.
What they want
- Pursuing a BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related field.
- Hands-on experience designing, building, or operating electrical test setups for complex hardware—power electronics strongly preferred.
- Comfort with bench power equipment and measurement methods: scopes, DMMs, power analyzers, electronic loads, DAQ, and sensors.
- Ability to design safe test systems for high-power hardware: interlocks, protection, grounding, and safe operating procedures.
- Strong debugging instincts and ability to drive root-cause closure with engineering partners.
- Programming experience in Python—including instrument control or data automation.