Moment Energy’s 16 Open Roles Reveal the Tight Labor Market for Second-Life Battery Integrators

Moment Energy lists 16 open roles across engineering, operations, and business functions — a signal that the Vancouver startup has moved from pilot to commercial deployment of second-life battery storage. The company, founded in 2020 by four tech entrepreneurs, is staffing up as it scales what it calls the world's largest repurposing megafactory. Partnerships with Nissan North America and Mercedes-Benz Energy feed the pipeline. UL 1974 certification, the safety standard for second-life battery systems, lets the company ship product across North America. The technical requirements reveal what the job postings only hint at: Moment isn't hiring battery engineers. It's hiring engineers who can reverse-engineer trust from a chemistry they didn't design.

The Technical Screen: Reverse-Engineering Trust from Unknown Chemistry

The roles demand fluency in a loop that starts with a used EV battery module — degraded, unbalanced, and full of unknowns — and ends with a certified, grid-tied storage asset warranted for 10-plus years of additional life.

The work spans three layers. First, module characterization. The Battery Engineer role requires developing test methodologies for cells and modules arriving from automakers with no birth certificates, no uniform degradation data. The job demands designing test plans that characterize impedance, capacity fade, and thermal behavior across hundreds of modules, then feeding those results into failure mode and effects analysis that informs product design. Second, hardware-in-the-loop validation. Senior R&D Test Technician and Lead Hand roles own building and maintaining test benches at component, BMS, and system levels, including PLC-driven scripts that simulate real-world charge-discharge cycles. Third, cross-disciplinary integration. Battery engineers sit alongside electrical, mechanical, and firmware teams to debug energy storage system faults and refine cell models for performance prediction.

The company's own data claims fivefold energy density improvements and a decade-plus of additional useful life extracted from retired packs. Those numbers only hold if the characterization work catches the outliers before they reach the field.

The roles posted (Senior Power Electronics Engineer, Senior R&D Test Technician, Battery Assembly Lead Hand, Final Assembly Lead Hand, Assembly Technician) map directly to this workflow. The test technician roles own the bench infrastructure. The power electronics role owns the BMS HIL integration. The lead hands own the transition from validated module to assembled system. Each position requires fluency in the same loop: test, model, integrate, iterate.

Capital Events Compressed the Timeline

Moment Energy's 16 open roles are not a speculative hiring spree. They are a direct response to a compressed sequence of capital events and project milestones that moved the company from pilot validation to commercial deployment in months.

Together, the two tranches fund a parallel build-out: doubling the Vancouver headquarters footprint and workforce while advancing a 1 GWh annual-capacity repurposing facility in Texas expected to create more than 250 skilled jobs once fully operational.

The timing is not coincidental. Moment's battery energy storage systems have been deployed in projects ranging from 400 kWh to 10 MWh across utilities, microgrids, and commercial customers — including off-grid sites like God's Pocket Resort, where a second-life system cut diesel usage by two-thirds and has logged over 1,000 cycles. Those installations served as the proof points automakers needed. Mercedes-Benz Energy and other OEM partners now feed retired packs into Moment's pipeline at a time when nearly 1,000 GWh of second-life batteries are projected to become available for repurposing by 2030. The company's advanced battery management technology and strategic partnerships position it to capture a slice of a total addressable market exceeding $150 billion by 2030, driven by 1.2 TWh of global storage demand.

Vancouver's expansion is already visible in the hiring data. Zero G Talent's board shows six roles added in the past seven days in Surrey, BC, reflecting the shift from R&D-heavy headcount to production-ready roles. The Texas gigafactory, described as the world's first dedicated to repurposing EV batteries, will require its own engineering, operations, and supply-chain teams to handle pack intake, diagnostics, grading, and module reassembly at gigawatt-hour scale. CEO Edward Chiang said the funding will "accelerate our mission to provide reliable and affordable clean energy solutions," while Amazon Climate Pledge Fund principal Nick Ellis called Moment's approach "an elegant solution to scalable energy storage" that tackles a growing recycling challenge.

The hiring surge also reflects a competitive dynamic: cleantech hardware investment declined broadly in 2023, with Canadian deals falling from 101 to 75 and U.S. firms attracting two to three times the capital, per a MaRS report cited by FoundersToday. Moment's ability to close a Series A in that environment — backed by strategic investors including In-Q-Tel, Version One Ventures, and Overture Ventures, signals that its pilot-to-commercial transition is being treated as a de-risked milestone. The 16 roles span engineering, operations, and business functions because the company is simultaneously scaling manufacturing, deepening automaker integration, and building the sales and project-delivery capacity to serve commercial and industrial customers who can now access federal tax credits and utility incentives that routinely reduce project costs to under 10 percent of total capital investment.

The Talent Gap: Chemists Meet Recycling Logistics

The disassembly line at a second-life battery facility looks nothing like a battery lab. Up to two dozen manual steps. Sixteen hours per pack. Cylindrical cells fight back; prismatic cells yield more easily. Every manufacturer builds differently, with pouch, prismatic, cylindrical, and custom module architectures, so automation hits a wall before it starts. Engineering literature is blunt: "very little to no standardization, thus making automation almost impossible." That sentence explains why Moment Energy cannot hire pure battery chemists or pure recycling technicians and expect them to function.

A battery chemist understands degradation pathways: capacity fade, impedance rise, calendar aging, the physics of lithium plating. They can model state-of-health estimation and design thermal management for a known cell. But hand them a retired pack with unknown history, mixed cell voltages, and a proprietary busbar weld pattern, and the models break. The pack arrives with inconsistency among its cells. That inconsistency drives over-discharge or overcharge during disassembly, which triggers thermal runaway. Technicians must work under voltage. Manual over-discharging creates electrical hazards when not all cells are fully discharged. The literature calls the remanufacturing process "very difficult, problematic, and dangerous."

Conversely, a recycling technician knows how to shred, sort, and recover cobalt, nickel, lithium. They understand hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy. But second-life is not recycling — it is remanufacturing. The goal is to keep the cell intact, reassemble it into a new module, and warranty it for stationary storage. That demands diagnostic precision: state-of-charge control, state-of-health estimation, load scheduling algorithms tuned for degraded cells. The recycling expert sees end-of-life; the second-life engineer sees middle-of-life.

The cost structure exposes the gap. More than half a second-life battery's final cost sits in the purchase of retired packs. Labor and administration each claim another thirteenth. Qualified workers, the ones who can safely disassemble, diagnose, and reassemble, directly determine whether the economics work. McKinsey still projects a 30-to-70-percent price advantage over new batteries in 2025, but that margin evaporates if disassembly takes sixteen hours instead of four, or if a technician misses a cell imbalance that later causes a field failure. The industry needs people who can optimize both the chemistry and the logistics simultaneously.

Volvo's AI "design engine", built to predict when a battery should be replaced and how it can be reused, illustrates the hybrid profile. It fuses aging data with reuse strategy. The DOE's Battery Workforce Challenge added a Design for Recyclability category precisely because the pipeline produces specialists, not integrators. LACI's Green Jobs program trains for certifications in disassembly safety and diagnostics, but graduates still need years on the line to handle the variance across OEM pack designs.

The market has battery scientists. It has recycling operators. It has BMS firmware engineers. It has supply chain managers. It has almost no one who has done all four inside the same facility. That is the talent gap. And until training programs or internal apprenticeships produce it, every second-life startup will compete for the same handful of people who learned by doing.

Certifications, Roles, and Why Generalists Fall Short

Moment's certification wall is the first filter candidates hit. The company's Luna BESS system holds UL 1973, UL 9540, and UL 9540A — the full safety stack for stationary storage — and in 2024 it became the first North American outfit to secure UL 1974, the standard written specifically for evaluating repurposed batteries. That credential isn't decorative. As Chiang said, UL certification is what lets them commercially deploy projects on-grid; without it, a fire event leaves the building uninsured.

Resume guides for battery engineers consistently flag quantified achievements, such as percentage gains in energy density, cost reductions, and cycle-life improvements, as the difference between a stack that gets read and one that gets archived. A bullet that reads "designed and executed comprehensive testing protocols for battery performance, leading to a 25% improvement in cycle life over previous models" carries more weight than a paragraph listing responsibilities. The same guides warn against generic objectives, jargon overload, and the omission of soft skills; Chiang said the company screens for people who are "genuine" and "care about the environment," not just technical mercenaries.

Hands-on time with used EV packs is the scarcest proof point. The company operates seven revenue-generating sites, not pilots, and its partnership with Pulsenics leans on AccelaGrade, a qualification platform that cuts used-battery testing time by up to 90 percent and reports state-of-health in under 30 minutes. Prior work at an OEM battery plant, a recycling facility, or a second-life integrator counts double; a pure simulation background without bench time does not.

Published work helps, but only when it touches the repurposing loop. Papers on degradation modeling, thermal runaway propagation in aged cells, or UL 1974 test-method development signal that the applicant understands the unique failure modes of second-life inventory. Resume guides recommend listing "familiarity with regulations, standards, or emerging technologies in battery engineering"; at Moment, that means naming the exact UL clauses you've designed to, not just "knowledge of safety standards."

The cross-functional edge shows up in supply-chain awareness. Chiang has noted that recycling costs are prohibitive for consumers and automakers, and that 93 percent of end-of-life EV batteries currently miss the recycling stream entirely. The company's push toward a 1 GWh/year "second-life gigafactory" means the next hiring wave will weigh manufacturing-scale process experience as heavily as R&D chops.

The job descriptions make the boundary explicit. Moment's Senior Firmware Engineer role demands seven-plus years of embedded firmware development, preferably in renewable energy or automotive, with fluency in C/C++, real-time operating systems, CAN and Modbus protocols, ARM microcontroller architectures, and debugging tools such as JTAG, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers. The deliverables are control algorithms for battery management systems: cell balancing, state estimation, fault detection. The validation path runs through hardware-in-the-loop testing and safety-critical standards such as ASIL. A cloud-native developer who has never brought up a board, probed a CAN bus, or written a state-estimation routine that must not fail when a cell drifts out of spec does not clear this screen.

The same filter applies to the Software Engineering Co-op posting. It asks for front-end and back-end work on the cloud platform that powers the battery management system, but couples that with a strong preference for design-team or prior co-op experience and an explicit interest in cloud platforms, IoT systems, and connected hardware. The co-op will "collaborate with engineers across hardware and software teams to support product development." A pure web developer without exposure to embedded targets, sensor data pipelines, or the latency and reliability constraints of a BMS talking to 25,000 repurposed packs a year at Megafactory 1 is not the profile Moment is sourcing.

Generalist electrical engineering backgrounds hit a similar wall. The company's own career pages split engineering into three distinct pillars: Battery Engineering (source, test, repurpose retired EV packs into safe, reliable BESS), Electrical & Firmware (design and integrate power electronics, control systems, embedded firmware that manage battery performance, safety, and communication), and Mechanical Design (engineer an outdoor enclosure rated for 30-plus years, including thermal management and structural systems). A candidate who has designed PCB layouts for consumer electronics but has never characterized cell degradation, modeled thermal runaway propagation, or sized a DC-DC converter for a 1 MWh containerized system built from second-life modules lacks the specific voltage, current, and safety vocabulary these roles require.

The production and manufacturing roles sharpen the distinction further. Assembling fully integrated BESS units means combining repurposed batteries, fire detection, HVAC, and power conversion systems within certified steel enclosures, all under UL 1974 and UL 60730-1 certifications that Moment secured as the first in North America. That certification regime governs every torque spec, every creepage distance, every thermal barrier. A mechanical engineer who has never worked to a UL 1974 test plan, or a quality engineer unfamiliar with the traceability chain from an OEM's retired pack through disassembly, grading, and re-certification, cannot operate in this flow.

The research reveals no public statement from Moment saying "we do not hire X." The exclusion is structural: every open role, whether Battery Engineering Co-op asking for Python or MATLAB data analysis on cell test data, Senior R&D Test Technician, Final Assembly Lead Hand, or Battery Assembly Lead Hand, sits inside the same end-to-end loop, from retired pack to warranted grid-tied asset (outlined above). The hybrid skill set the company filters for includes battery chemistry diagnostics, power electronics integration, embedded safety firmware, mechanical thermal design, and the supply chain logistics of sourcing exclusively from North American automakers. Pure software, pure EE, or pure mechanical backgrounds are not disqualified by policy; they are disqualified by the physics of the problem Moment is paid to solve.

The Competitive Scramble

The second-life battery sector has moved from pilot projects to a commercial race, and the hiring data reflects it. Startus Insights tracks more than 4,100 companies worldwide in the space, with 460-plus new entrants since 2020 and ten flagged as standout innovators across battery upcycling, BMS development, and second-life energy storage systems. That count alone signals a labor market under pressure: every new facility needs engineers who can diagnose degradation, design repurposing workflows, and manage reverse logistics from OEM take-back programs.

The IEA put global EV battery demand at 1 TWh in 2024, a volume that would have taken a full year to produce a decade ago. By 2030, 11 million retired EV packs will need a destination, and 70 percent of their capacity remains intact.

Job boards show the scramble. Indeed listed 477 battery engineering openings in Los Angeles alone at last count. That single metro area captures OEM battery labs, recycling startups, grid-storage integrators, and the second-life specialists all fishing from the same talent pool. The hybrid profile Moment screens for — electrochemistry fluency plus pack-level disassembly experience plus supply-chain rigor — is exactly what every other player in that 460-plus cohort needs to hit commercial milestones.

The ten standout innovators Startus identified are not public in the research, but their technology tags, battery upcycling, BMS, second-life ESS, map directly to the roles Moment is filling. Each title implies hands-on work with used cells, not just simulation or cell-level R&D. Competitors building similar stationary storage products from retired packs, whether spun out of automotive OEMs, founded by recycling veterans, or backed by utility strategics, are posting near-identical requisitions.

Moment's 16 open roles, including the latest additions in Surrey, BC, sit inside this wider wave. The company's first-party board data shows active hiring across power electronics, assembly, test, and operations, a spread that mirrors what a scaling second-life integrator needs to move from pilot to repeatable deployment. Every other firm crossing that same threshold is competing for the same narrow slice of engineers who have actually touched retired EV modules, run diagnostic protocols on mixed-state packs, and built the logistics chain to get those packs from dismantler to enclosure.

The talent gap is structural. Traditional battery chemists lack the reverse-logistics and pack-reassembly experience. Recycling specialists lack the BMS and power-electronics depth to design a second-life product that meets grid interconnection standards. Generalist electrical engineers lack the degradation-modeling chops to warranty a 15-year stationary asset built from cells with unknown histories. That intersection — the hybrid profile — is what every company in the 460-plus cohort is hunting. Moment's screen is strict because the market makes it strict; the alternative is hiring someone who cannot ship product.

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