Electric Propulsion Engineer
- Propulsion
- Rehovot, Israel
- Full-time
Why this role exists
AIRLIFT One exists to make urban flight quiet enough that cities say yes. In electric aircraft, once aerodynamic sources are suppressed, the drivetrain can become what remains: torque ripple, radial force harmonics, and inverter switching rise toward the dominant tones an observer on the ground hears. This role owns the electric propulsion system as an acoustic source — you will design motors and drives where electromagnetic noise is a first-order requirement, traded with the same rigor as power density, efficiency, and mass.
What you'll own
- Design and analyze motor electromagnetics with torque ripple, cogging torque, and radial force harmonics treated as hard requirements alongside efficiency and power density.
- Develop inverter modulation and current-control strategies — including harmonic injection and active ripple compensation — that suppress electromagnetic excitation before it becomes radiated tone.
- Build and validate multiphysics models chaining electromagnetic force prediction through structural transfer paths to radiated noise, correlated against dyno and vehicle data.
- Plan and execute dyno test campaigns with synchronized electrical, vibration, and acoustic instrumentation, owning the data pipeline from raw capture to engineering verdict.
- Integrate motors, inverters, and mounts into the vehicle's novel lift and propulsion architecture, working structure-borne transmission paths jointly with the Structures and Acoustics teams.
- Characterize thermal behavior on the dyno and derive continuous and peak torque envelopes that hold across the full flight profile.
- Define acceptance and qualification test procedures for propulsion units, including back-EMF, efficiency-map, vibration, and acoustic signature checks.
- Lead propulsion design reviews and hardware failure investigations, driving root cause to closure with documented corrective actions.
What you bring
- B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Electrical or Mechanical Engineering with a focus on electric machines, power electronics, or drives.
- 5+ years designing electric motors or motor drives for demanding applications — aerospace, automotive traction, robotics, or similar.
- Deep working knowledge of electric machine noise mechanisms: torque ripple, cogging, radial force harmonics, and PWM sideband tones, and how to design them down.
- Hands-on experience with field-oriented control and modulation schemes, including controller implementation and current-loop tuning in MATLAB/Simulink or PLECS.
- Proficiency with electromagnetic FEA tools such as ANSYS Maxwell, Motor-CAD, or JMAG, including loss and force-harmonic prediction.
- Demonstrated dyno or rig test experience: instrumentation selection, data acquisition setup, and debugging real hardware under load.
- Strong Python or MATLAB skills for test data reduction, order analysis, and model correlation.
- Comfortable owning hardware end to end — requirements through test — in a small team moving at startup pace.
Even better if
- Prior propulsion work on eVTOL, UAM, or other electric aircraft programs.
- NVH background: order tracking, run-up/coast-down analysis, or experimental transfer path analysis.
- SiC or GaN power stage design experience, including gate-drive and switching-loss trade studies.
- Exposure to aerospace qualification and safety processes such as DO-160 environmental testing or high-voltage system safety standards.
- Publications or patents in electric machine design, drive control, or electromagnetic noise reduction.
Why this matters to quiet flight
In an electric aircraft, the drivetrain produces the tones people notice — the whine that makes a vehicle feel intrusive long before it is loud. Your motor and inverter decisions set the floor under the entire acoustic architecture: no airframe treatment can remove a tone the propulsion system insists on making. If you get this right, the vehicle's signature dissolves into the urban background, and that is the difference between a demonstrator and a fleet cities permit overhead.
Life at AIRLIFT One
Small team, total ownership
No layers between you and the aircraft. You own your domain end-to-end — analysis, hardware, test — and your decisions fly.
Aviation breathing culture
Work alongside aviation geeks—engineers, innovators, and builders who are passionate about shaping the future of flight.
Stealth, not isolation
We don't publish yet, but we argue, test, and review relentlessly inside. Intellectual honesty is a daily practice, not a poster.
Built in Rehovot
We work on-site, around the hardware, in one of Israel's deepest engineering talent pools.
Apply
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