Principal Power Electronics Architect

Founded in 2018, SmartD is disrupting the century-old industry of electrical motor control with a next-generation Clean Power variable frequency drive built on wide-bandgap (SiC) semiconductors. We are a Series A-funded team based in downtown Montreal, with our product manufactured at scale by a global contract manufacturer and sold worldwide through white-label partnerships with two of the largest names in industrial automation. This is not a lab project: our drives are certified, in production, and running in the field.

We are looking for a Principal Power Electronics Architect — the technical authority who owns how our power conversion system behaves as a system, from topology to thermal to EMI to control interaction, across our current platform and the next generation.

Why this role exists

Our hardware team is strong at execution. We have excellent PCB designers and experienced power electronics specialists who are formidable in the lab. What we are hiring is the person who sees the whole system move at once — who can predict how a change in the DC link ripples through gate drive margins, control loop stability, thermal design, and conducted emissions before anyone builds a board. This role carries design authority. When architecture trade-offs are on the table, you make the call and you own the consequences.

What You’ll Own

• System architecture: Topology selection, power stage architecture, DC link design, gate drive strategy, thermal architecture, and EMI strategy for SiC-based drives — as one interacting system, not a list of blocks.
• Design authority: Lead architecture and design reviews across the hardware team. Your sign-off means the design will survive certification, manufacturing, and the field.
• Requirements flow-down: Translate product requirements (efficiency, THDi, common-mode voltage, cost, reliability targets) into architecture decisions and block-level specifications the design team executes against.
• Hard problems: When the team is stuck on an interaction problem — resonances, instabilities, EMI that moves when you touch anything — you are the person who frames it at the system level and drives it to root cause.
• Raising the bar: Mentor our senior power electronics specialists from component-level to system-level thinking. This is deliberate, ongoing work, not an afterthought.
• Next generation: Architect our next platform with manufacturability, certification, and cost designed in from day one — informed by everything the current platform taught us.

What this role is not

• Not a PCB layout role. We have excellent Altium designers who own schematics and layout. You will work with them daily, but your value is in what goes on the board and why, not routing it.
• Not a people-management role — at least not on day one. This is a senior individual contributor position with technical leadership and no direct reports at the start. That said, we’re a scaling team: for an architect who has established technical credibility and wants to grow into leading a team, that path is open. We’ll hire you for your system-level judgment — where the role goes from there is a conversation we’re happy to have.

What You Bring

We are looking for someone who has built real products and faced real problems — not prototypes. Concretely, that means you can talk about:

• Products you architected that shipped at volume — with serial numbers, RMA rates, and a contract manufacturer who pushed back on your design. You know what breaks when a design leaves your lab and lands in someone else’s factory.
• A certification campaign you carried — UL, IEC/EN, CE — including the redesigns it forced, not just pre-compliance scans that looked promising.
• A field failure you root-caused — units that came back from customers, the pressure of a live escalation, and the design change you issued because of it.
• A design decision you got wrong — and what it cost, and what you changed in how you architect because of it.
• Deep, hands-on SiC (or GaN at power) design — switching cells, gate drive, commutation loops, dv/dt management, and the EMI consequences of fast switching — required.
• 10+ years in power electronics, with system-level ownership of inverters, converters, or drives in the kW-to-hundreds-of-kW range — required. Motor control experience is a strong asset.
• Fluency in the analytical toolkit: worst-case analysis, derating, loss modeling, thermal modeling, control-loop interaction, SPICE-level simulation where it matters.
• Language: The working language is English. French is an asset but not required. We support relocation and immigration for the right candidate.

Benefits & Work Environment

• Compensation: Competitive salary compared to market standards
• Health & Security: Comprehensive coverage including Extended Health Care, Disability Insurance, and Life Insurance.
• Time Off: 4 weeks of paid vacation from day one.
• Flexibility: A hybrid work environment with a focus on results.
• The Lab Advantage: We spend the majority of our time on-site at our 425 rue Guy office. Hardware is a team sport; being near the lab and our colleagues fosters the real-time "aha!" moments that drive our technology.
• Commute: A 10-minute walk from Lucien-L'Allier (Orange line), with immediate access to bus lines 35, 36, and 71.

Our Hiring Process

We respect your time and keep the process focused:

• Introductory Call (20 min): A general discussion via Google Meet to align on interest and fit.
• Technical Deep Dive (45 min): A system-level discussion with our Head of Hardware via Google Meet — expect to walk through a product you architected, end to end.
• On-Site Architecture Session (1.5 hours): A working session with your future colleagues around a real system-level problem, a field-failure deep dive, and a tour of our lab.

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