Chief Technology Officer — Interim, Power Electronics

The mandate

High-load thermal cycling caused repeated inverter shutdowns during customer pilots, and the CTO resigned after a launch pause. Hardware, controls and mechanical teams disagree on whether architecture or production variation is dominant.

The interim must join within three weeks for fifteen months through redesign, validation and controlled market release. A permanent search starts when design freeze is approved, with two months of technical overlap planned.

Handover requires the revised platform passing accelerated-life and environmental tests, field failure below 0.5 per cent across 1,000 deployed units, released design documentation, and the successor signing the architecture and residual-risk record.

The CTO may freeze design, select technical trade-offs and approve external testing below ₹75 lakh. Product cancellation, requirements reducing contractual performance and capital above ₹3 crore need committee approval; manufacturing Quality controls production release.

New market entry, sales-channel design and battery product development are excluded. The mandate fixes and governs the inverter platform already committed to customers.

Why this seat is open

Thermal failure exposed fragmented systems ownership at the edge of engineering disciplines. Departure of the incumbent removed the only office nominally able to decide the architecture. An interim technical executive must close causality, govern proof and give the permanent CTO a stable baseline.

What you will own

• Reconstruct failure physics across semiconductor junction, thermal path, enclosure, control logic and operating profile.
• Decide the corrective architecture using trade studies covering efficiency, reliability, cost and manufacturability.
• Freeze interfaces and establish configuration control across power stage, cooling, firmware and mechanics.
• Approve accelerated-life, environmental and abuse-test protocols against representative field duty.
• Gate pilot and market release through traceable requirement, hazard, change and verification evidence.
• Establish field telemetry and failure-analysis loops for the first 1,000 deployed units.
• Transfer the platform architecture, technical debt and evidence base to the permanent CTO.

Candidate qualifications

• More than twenty-two years in power electronics or industrial embedded products with CTO-level design authority.
• Recovered a high-power converter, inverter, drive or charger after thermal or reliability failure.
• Deep command of semiconductor selection, thermal design, controls, EMC, safety and accelerated-life testing.
• Systems judgment across electrical, software, mechanical and manufacturing causes rather than single-discipline advocacy.
• Experience releasing corrective designs into fielded fleets with telemetry and disciplined configuration control.
• Ability to explain uncertain failure evidence and risk trade-offs candidly to boards and customers.

Non-negotiables

• Can join in Pune within three weeks and travel to pilot customers and test laboratories.
• No current interest in semiconductor, thermal or test vendors under selection.
• Prepared to keep launch paused until reliability evidence passes approved gates.
• Available through the fifteen-month correction and permanent-CTO transition.

1. 49 words maximum. State your availability and ability to travel to field-failure and test sites.
2. 49 words maximum. Which thermal failure did you solve, and what physical evidence isolated the dominant mechanism?
3. 49 words maximum. What accelerated-life result did you require before releasing the corrected architecture?