Battery Safety and Compliance Engineer, Energy Storage

Battery Safety and Compliance Engineer, Energy Storage

The Battery Certification Engineer is one of the most technically demanding roles on our ESS Engineering team. We receive end-of-life EV battery packs and repurpose them into stationary energy storage systems. We are doing this at scale, with pack types we did not design and cannot fully disassemble or retest individually. That creates a profound certification challenge: the existing standards were not written for second-life systems, many requirements are technically misaligned with real-world EV pack design constraints, and no NRTL has an established pathway for certifying what we build.

This role exists to solve that problem — not by finding workarounds, but by building the technical foundation for a new certification paradigm. You will own Redwood's battery-level certification strategy across UL 1973, UL 1974, UL 9540, and related standards, develop the engineering basis for standards reform, and serve as the company's deepest subject matter expert on EV battery pack design and electrochemical safety.

Responsibilities will include:

Certification Program Development

• Own and drive Redwood's certification strategy for repurposed EV battery packs in stationary ESS applications, spanning UL 1973, UL 1974, UL 9540, and UL 9540A.
• Design a certification regime that is technically rigorous, practically executable, and applicable across multiple OEM pack types, chemistries, and form factors — LFP, NMC, NCA; pouch, prismatic, cylindrical.
• Manage test planning, NRTL coordination, witness testing, deficiency resolution, and certification closure across concurrent workstreams.
• Develop and defend Alternative Means & Methods (AM&M) approaches with AHJs and certification bodies where standard pathways are not achievable for repurposed systems.

Technical Basis for Standards Reform

• Identify, document, and technically argue cases where existing certification requirements are disproportionate to actual safety risk, based on outdated assumptions, or misaligned with established automotive engineering practice.
• A representative example: UL 1973 may specify a creepage or clearance distance that conflicts with the SAE-governed PCB design constraints of an OEM BMS. The gap does not represent a safety deficiency — it represents standards misalignment. You will make that case with engineering data, failure analysis, and regulatory precedent.