Technical Intern, Materials and Battery Engineering

About us

HARDDRIVE is a Singapore-based engineering consultancy. We work across energy systems, advanced materials, medtech, electronics manufacturing and industrial supply chain. Companies bring us their systems when they need an independent engineer to assess whether the design is safe, whether it will perform as claimed and what will fail first.

A significant part of our work sits in energy. We work with cell and battery developers, system integrators and the operators who run battery systems in the field, across manufacturing, marine, mobility, data centre and industrial applications. That spans advanced cell development support, pack and system architecture review, charging and BMS assessment, failure investigation, test and commissioning, and independent technical review for owners, insurers and financiers.

We are small, the work is real and nothing here is a training exercise.

The role

You will work directly with the founder on live client projects. This is not a shadowing internship. You will be handed scope, given the source documents and expected to produce analysis that goes into a deliverable a client is paying for, with our review.

We are looking for someone who has already touched batteries in a lab, a test bench or a production environment and now wants to see how that knowledge is applied commercially, under a deadline, with a client on the other side.

You will be given scope, the source documents and a deadline, then left to it. We will review your work and push back hard on it, but we will not walk you through it step by step. You are expected to flag what you do not know early, then go and close the gap yourself.

What you will do

• Review datasheets, specifications and design documentation for battery packs, BMS units, chargers and inverters, and identify where the numbers do not agree with each other

• Support independent safety reviews: charging architecture, cell chemistry limits, BMS threshold configuration, protection logic and series or parallel topology

• Build and maintain technical risk registers, mapping failure modes to severity, likelihood and mitigation

• Draft test and commissioning plans, then support remote review of verification evidence and integrated safety testing

• Research and benchmark cell chemistries, materials and competing system architectures for client decisions

• Write clean, cited technical documentation to our reporting standard

• Contribute to project work outside batteries as it comes in. Materials selection, failure analysis and reliability work all show up here

Who we are looking for

• Degree or final-year study in Materials Science, Materials Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering

• Prior hands-on battery experience is required. Research lab, coin or pouch cell fabrication, pack assembly, battery test lab, QA or a previous industry internship all count. Tell us what you actually did, not what the group worked on

• Working understanding of Li-ion cell chemistry and how NMC, LFP, LCO and NCA differ in voltage window, energy density, thermal behaviour and failure mode

• Familiarity with at least some of: cycling and capacity fade testing, internal resistance or EIS measurement, thermal characterisation, SEM, XRD, DSC or TGA, glovebox work, BMS configuration, pack-level integration

• You are careful with numbers. In this work a decimal place is the difference between a safe recommendation and a dangerous one

• You can write. Technical judgment that cannot be explained on paper is worth nothing to a client

• You work independently and say so when you are stuck. Asking a sharp question on day two is fine. Going quiet for a week and producing nothing is not

Nice to have, not required

• Exposure to battery and energy storage standards: IEC 62619, IEC 62133, UN 38.3, UL 1973 or UL 9540A

• Comfortable using AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT in a technical workflow, with a clear sense of where they stop being trustworthy

• Any experience with BESS, inverters, EV systems or power electronics

What you get

• Direct mentorship from the founder on live commercial engineering work

• Ownership of your own workstreams inside real projects, not a supporting role on someone else's

• Exposure to how independent technical assessment is scoped, priced and defended in front of a client

• A portfolio of real project contributions and a written reference

• Monthly stipend

Details

• Location: Singapore. Fully remote

• Duration: 3 to 6 months, with flexibility around your academic schedule

• Start: Immediate or by arrangement

• Eligibility: Open to Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents only

How to apply

Send your CV and a short note to [email protected]. In the note, answer this in under five sentences: describe one battery failure mode you have seen, read about or tested, explain the physical mechanism behind it and tell us what you would check in a design review to catch it early.

We read every application. If your answer is good you will hear from us within a week.

Skills

Build Trust, Numeracy, Preparation of Technical Documents, Failure Modes, Development of Test Plans, ChatGPT, Topology, Automotive Electrical Systems, Power Electronics, Material Selection, Cell Based Assays, IEC, Battery and Energy Storage System Testing and Diagnostics, Datasheets, Inverters, Failure Analysis