Battery Technician

Altora, Inc.   |   Ann Arbor, MI   |   Full time, onsite

The Role

Altora, a Treetown Tech (https://www.treetowntech.com) company, builds power and sensing hardware for unmanned systems. Battery packs, power management, and the electronics that keep an aircraft flying. Our technicians are the people who turn a design into a physical, flight-worthy article, and they do it for everything from a one-off engineering prototype to a repeatable production build.

We are looking for a Battery Technician with three to seven years of hands-on experience who can work from a drawing without a lot of hand-holding. You will spend part of your week building packs to an established process and part of it at the bench with engineers, putting together first articles for designs that have never been built before. Those are different jobs, and we want someone who is good at both.

What You'll Do

Pack build and assembly. Sort and match cells, spot weld and solder interconnects, build and dress harnesses, install BMS boards and sensing leads, pot and insulate, and close out the mechanical assembly. Work to the drawing, the BOM, and the revision that is actually released.

Prototype and first-article work. Sit with the engineering team on new designs. Build the first one, then tell us what was wrong with it. Fixtures, tooling, and assembly sequence are often undefined at this stage, and your input on what is actually buildable is a large part of the value you bring.

Test and verification. Run capacity, impedance, and cycle checks. Set up and operate cyclers and data acquisition. Record results cleanly enough that an engineer can use them a year from now.

Documentation. Turn what you did into work instructions other people can follow. Redline drawings that do not match reality. Keep serialization and traceability records accurate.

Safety and housekeeping. Lithium cells are unforgiving. You will own the safe handling, storage, and disposal practices at your bench and hold others to them.

Support the rest of the shop. Cable and harness work, box builds, and general electromechanical assembly come through here too. Some weeks the battery queue is light and something else is on fire.

What We're Looking For

• Three or more years building electromechanical or electrical assemblies. Battery pack experience is strongly preferred, but a strong harness, wire, or precision assembly background with a real interest in batteries will get our attention.

• Comfortable reading schematics, wiring diagrams, assembly drawings, and a BOM.

• Solid hand soldering. IPC J-STD-001 certification is a plus, and we will pay to get you certified if you are not.

• Experience with spot welding, crimping, potting, or heat-shrink and insulation work on battery assemblies.

• Familiar with DMMs, power supplies, electronic loads, and battery cyclers.

• Careful with records. If it is not written down, it did not happen.

• Able to work independently on a build and know exactly when to stop and ask.

• undefined

Nice to have

• Lithium ion or LiPo pack design exposure

• BMS bring-up and configuration

• UN 38.3 or DOT shipping requirements

• ESD control practices

• Small UAS or defense hardware experience

• Basic 3D printing or fixture fabrication

• Familiarity with ITAR-controlled work

What a Typical Week Looks Like

Monday you are closing out a production run of packs that ship Thursday. Wednesday an engineer drops a new pack design on your bench with a bag of cells and a half-finished fixture, and by Friday you have built two, broken one on purpose, and written down the four things that need to change before anyone builds a third. That mix is the job.

Your First 90 Days

By the end of 90 days you are building our current pack configurations independently and to standard, you have taken at least one new design from drawing to working first article, and you have improved or written at least one work instruction that the next person can actually follow.

Reporting and Team

Reports to the Engineering Manager. Individual contributor with no direct reports, though senior technicians mentor newer ones. You will work daily alongside electrical, mechanical, and test engineers. Altora is co-located with Treetown Tech in Ann Arbor, and the teams share a shop floor.

Working Conditions

Onsite at our Ann Arbor facility. Shop and lab environment. Regular lifting up to 40 pounds, extended periods standing or seated at a bench, and close-up detail work with small components. Required PPE for cell handling and testing.

Some of our work supports U.S. defense programs and may be subject to export control regulations. Applicants may need to qualify as a U.S. Person under ITAR.

Why Altora

You will not be one of forty technicians on a line building the same SKU. We are a small, growing team, so you will see the whole product, your feedback will change the design, and the thing you built last month is flying somewhere. Competitive pay, full benefits, and a shop that gets the tools it needs.