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. 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. When architecture trade-offs are on the table, you make the call and you own the consequences.

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. Lead architecture and design reviews across the hardware team. Your sign-off means the design will survive certification, manufacturing, and the field.

Translate product requirements (efficiency, THDi, common-mode voltage, cost, reliability targets) into architecture decisions and block-level specifications the design team executes against. 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. Mentor our senior power electronics specialists from component-level to system-level thinking.

This is deliberate, ongoing work, not an afterthought. 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.

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 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. ~ 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 robust 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.

Compensation: Competitive salary compared to market standards. Comprehensive coverage including Extended Health Care, Disability Insurance, and Life Insurance.

Time Off: 4 weeks of paid vacation from day one.

The Lab Advantage: We spend the majority of our time on-site at our 425 rue Guy office. A 10-minute walk from Lucien-L’Allier (Orange line), with immediate access to bus lines 35, 36, and 71.

Technical Deep

Dive (45 min): 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. #

📌 Principal Power Electronics Architect (Montreal)
🏢 SmartD Technologies
📍 Montreal