Hiring a Battery Team: Which Skills Must Be In-House?

 

A growing EV company needs battery expertise, but “hire a battery team” is rarely a simple instruction. The work may span cell selection, pack design, Battery Management Systems (BMS), testing, supplier quality, manufacturing and field performance. Hiring for all of it at once can be slow and expensive.

The better question is: Which decisions must our own team be able to make?

The answer depends on what the company designs, builds and buys from suppliers. It also changes as a product moves from development into production.

Start with Product Ownership

Suppose a company buys cells from a supplier but designs its own battery packs. It may not need a large in-house cell chemistry team. It does, however, need people who can set pack requirements, understand cell behaviour, assess safety risks and challenge supplier claims.

If the company also develops its own BMS, it needs stronger in-house capability across electronics, embedded software and controls. These specialists must work closely with pack engineers, testing teams and vehicle engineers. Hiring each role separately, without considering how they will work together, can leave important gaps between teams.

Before writing job descriptions, leaders should map the battery decisions their company owns. Who sets specifications? Who signs off on test results? Who investigates failures? The answers reveal where internal expertise is essential.

Think Beyond Development

It is easy to focus the first hiring plan on engineers building the product. But a battery team also needs people who can help make the design repeatable in production and understand how it performs after vehicles reach customers.

A supplier quality specialist, for example, can help assess whether components consistently meet requirements. A testing and validation engineer can identify issues before production scales. Field quality professionals can bring information from service teams back to engineering.

The exact team will vary, but these responsibilities should have clear owners. Leaving them until “later” can put pressure on the original engineering hires to cover work they were not recruited to do.

Decide Where Partners Can Help

Working with external specialists, testing facilities or suppliers can be practical, particularly when a company needs a narrow skill for a defined piece of work. The risk comes when too much knowledge sits outside the business.

If a supplier makes a critical recommendation, does someone in-house have enough expertise to evaluate it? If a battery issue appears in the field, who can bring the evidence together and decide what happens next?

Companies do not need to employ every specialist permanently. They do need internal leaders who can ask the right questions and remain accountable for the product.

Hire in the Right Sequence

A hiring plan should follow the product roadmap. A company finalising its architecture may first need a senior battery leader who can define technical requirements and shape the team. As testing and production approach, validation, manufacturing and quality capabilities may become more urgent.

At SilverPeople, we help EV businesses turn these decisions into clearer hiring briefs. Instead of searching for every battery skill under one job title, we focus on the capabilities each role must bring and the work it must deliver.

The strongest battery team is not necessarily the biggest. It is the one with clear ownership of the decisions that matter most.