Motor Control Research Engineer - Protean Electric

Protean Electric is an automotive technology firm with around 100 talented people globally. Our purpose is to make electric vehicles better, for the people who use them and for a sustainable world. We believe that freedom of ideas, integrity of response, desire to improve, and collaborative thinking drive innovation. Joining Protean means working with talented experts across the organisation who value your ideas, empower you to make a difference, and encourage you to challenge yourself and others.

The Role involves working in the Advanced Engineering Team to innovate, design, test and analyse with the goal of ensuring that Protean’s products are the best on the market over the long term. This role will be offered at the Engineer, Senior Engineer or Principal Engineer level depending on experience.

Main Duties & Responsibilities

• Improving Protean Motor Control Software by identifying areas for potential improvement via software enhancement.
• Performing physical or simulation experiments with existing products.
• Being aware of state of the art in electric machine field and the potential benefit of new technologies.
• Motivating and planning projects to deliver these improvements.
• Creating proposals to allow prioritisation of this activity over others.
• Creating or using simulations at appropriate fidelity levels to prototype algorithms.
• Transferring algorithms to motor prototype software and demonstrating benefit in actual motors.
• Analysing results and producing reports showing achieved benefit.
• Supporting other engineering functions with tools to enable decisions involving trades across multiple disciplines.
• Understanding customer requirements (internal and external).
• Developing Protean motor and inverter simulation, analysis and optimisation tools.
• Providing these tools with multiple levels of fidelity to suit use case.
• Interfacing with external research establishments and consultants.
• Actively participating in international conferences and meetings.

If appointed at the more senior levels you will be required to:

• Develop long-term control strategies and goals for the organisation.
• Propose and lead larger, cross functional projects.
• Report at all relevant stages to key stakeholders, externally and internally.
• Mentor other team members.
• Establish and track performance metrics to measure the success of initiatives.

Reporting, Location & Travel

This role reports to the Team Lead and is based at Protean’s Farnham offices. The role may have occasional requirement for national and international travel to China & Europe.

Relevant Skills & Behaviours

We measure ourselves against our values:

• Will to Win: we succeed by delivering to customers; on time, on quality and on cost.
• Pioneering: we are passionate about the technology.
• Courageous: we face our challenges.
• Working Together: we can rely on each other and others can rely on us.
• Personally Responsible: we do what needs doing, when it needs doing.
• With Integrity: we are honest, open and respectful.

Successful candidates should be able to demonstrate the following relevant skills and behaviours:

• Research and development.
• Analysis of experimental data.
• Technical Leadership.
• Accuracy and attention to detail.
• Presentation skills.
• Excellent communication and team working skills.
• Matlab Simulink.
• Strong integrity & confidentiality.

Relevant Knowledge & Experience

Essential and/or desirable relevant knowledge and experience:

• Essential: Educated to PhD level in relevant discipline or significant experience in research environment.
• Multiphase permanent magnet synchronous electric machine characteristics and control methodologies.
• Electric machine simulation in matlab/simulink/simscape.

• Highly desirable: Understanding of modern inverter architectures and the benefits of each approach.
• Simulation of inverter characteristics at various levels of fidelity.
• Simulation and compensation for non-linear elements in real electric machines and inverters.
• Integration of electric machine simulations into larger systems.
• Modern optimisation techniques applied to complex systems.
• Experience of practical implementation of motor control algorithms.

• Desirable: Frequency domain analysis skills.
• Python programming skills.
• Cloud based processing and optimisation.
• Machine learning/AI in engineering design.