R&D Test Engineer

We are Sila, a next-generation battery materials company. Our mission is to power the world’s transition to clean energy. To create this future, our team is building a better lithium-ion battery from the inside out today. We engineer and manufacture ground-breaking battery materials that significantly increase the energy density of batteries, while reducing their size and weight. The result? Smaller more powerful batteries that can unlock innovation in consumer devices and accelerate the mass adoption of electric cars to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.

We're tackling one of the biggest challenges of our time every day, and together we're redefining what's possible. Are you ready to be a part of a team committed to changing the world?

We are Sila, a next-generation battery materials company. Our mission is to power the world’s transition to clean energy. To create this future, our team is building a better lithium-ion battery from the inside out today. We engineer and manufacture ground-breaking battery materials that significantly increase the energy density of batteries, while reducing their size and weight. The result? Smaller more powerful batteries that can unlock innovation in consumer devices and accelerate the mass adoption of electric cars to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.

We're tackling one of the biggest challenges of our time every day, and together we're redefining what's possible. Are you ready to be a part of a team committed to changing the world?

We're seeking an experienced, hands‑on R&D Test Engineer with an aptitude and desire for learning new things and making experiments happen. This position will put you at the forefront of Sila’s experimental efforts, with a focus on leading, designing, executing, and analyzing experiments on lab and pilot‑scale equipment as part of a growing, dynamic test engineering team. Your experiments will deliver the critical data necessary to understand how equipment design, process conditions, and material structure interact, enabling data‑informed decisions for scale‑up.

You will strive to accelerate Sila’s pace of learning and drive the company towards impactful decisions. You work as a team: you will rely on engineers, scientists, and technicians who, in turn, rely on you. You work at the interface of material science, process engineering, equipment engineering, systems engineering, and data science. You turn raw data into critical insights. You run towards problems not away.

If someone has an issue they need to debug, they come to you. You use your fundamental understanding, experiential insight, creative thinking, and the rest of the team to solve tough problems quickly and thoroughly. You have excellent communication skills and deftly navigate through technical discussions and debates.

• Conduct complete R&D projects in collaboration with engineering teams, including test planning, experimental design, preparation, execution, analysis, and communication of results
• Craft and execute effective experimental plans
• Find failure‑modes, root‑causes, and implement robust solutions
• Provide critical insights through hands‑on experience, deep process knowledge of the equipment, and thorough analysis of experimental data, system logs, and observations.
• Manage test platforms. Strive to make them world‑class.
• Formulate, lead, and facilitate complex data analysis projects

• Exceptional laboratory testing aptitude. Intuition for what will work and ability to execute quickly and effectively
• Experience conducting or leading experimental R&D projects
• Demonstrated experience with complex reactive or thermo‑mechanical systems like reactors, generators, catalytic systems, flow cells, or similar machines/processes
• Understanding and proven application of mechanical, process, and materials engineering principles: heat, flow, structures, thermodynamics, kinetics, and materials.
• Experience with data analysis and sufficient language knowledge, or polyglotism, to navigate data platforms in Python
• Experience with developing and deploying new instrumentation and measurement systems
• Demonst…