I want to control a 5A maximum 12V LED strip from a 3.3V ESP32.
I want do all of this with THT components ideally. I've been struggling to find the best way to drive the N FET so settled with an NPN as all of the IC drivers require 5V input.
Does the below schematic look like it should work or could anything be changed such as resistor values, possibly a gate drain resistor?
No. The problem is that when the MOSFET switches on, the voltage across it will fall down towards zero and that will reduce the supply to the resistor that drives the gate and turns it on. Instead of turning fully on it'll settle in a state where the drain-source voltage is somewhere around the Vgs threshold voltage for the device, dissipating a load of power and overheating.
Connect the pullup resistor directly to the 12V supply instead:
Your schematics looks good and it would work. But to turn off the LED current, you should give High to the NPN transistor's base. It will cause a leakage current when the LED is off. But if your design is not requiring low-power consumption, it will be not a serious issue.
As a reference, here I attach similar power gate circuit from one of our reference design. It is tested and worked well on real PCBA prototypes.
The major difference with yours is that here P-Channel MOSFET is used to gate the VCC line. Thus, the logic level is not reversed.
