Senior Software Engineer

Heliogen is a renewable energy technology company focused on eliminating the need for fossil fuels using the power of sunlight and software. Heliogen has invented the world’s first Sunlight Refinery™ – a green hydrogen and 24/7 electricity plant – capable of concentrating, capturing, and refining sunlight into cost-effective energy on demand, paving the way for an economical and full-scale global transition to a green economy by 2050.

About this role:

You will be developing our software responsible for controlling the equipment that concentrates solar energy onto our towers, where the heat is captured and converted into useful energy to provide green power for industry.  The software we create enables precise control of our solar concentrating field, as well as compute, network, and storage infrastructure to keep everything running smoothly. 

In this role, you will: 

·       Lead projects through the software development lifecycle from concept to delivery.

·       Be responsible for successful outcomes and delivery with a laser focus on execution and a keen eye for details.

·       Analysis, Simulation, Experimentation – Use rigorous techniques to understand the problems to be solved and characterize the systems used to solve them.

·       Control System Development – Use physics, computer vision, machine learning, and control theory to enable high performance concentrated solar thermal facilities. The algorithms you create will control megawatts of radiant power, heating materials to well above 1000° C.

·       Deployment & Support - Design, set up, and support the control systems for worldwide projects, including specifying and configuring hardware components (e.g. cameras).

·       Build on Heliogen’s technology by rapidly developing, testing, and incorporating improvements to our software.

·       Welcome, actively solicit, and act on feedback.

What's essential: [What we’re looking for:]

·       A desire to use your engineering skills to advance Heliogen’s mission to replace fossil fuels.

·       5+ years of software development (and associated system work, including control of hardware) in one of more of the following coding languages: C#, C, C++, Java, Python

·       Degree or equivalent experience in computer science, an engineering discipline, or physics.

·       Software development skills including gRPC, unit testing/TDD, and Git.

·       Algorithm design skills in conception, implementation, and debugging of novel systems.

·       Mathematical skills including linear algebra, 3D geometry, optimization, differential equations, and statistics

·       Ability to create and execute plans in a dynamic environment with ambiguous settings.

·       Solid knowledge of software development practices.

·       Strong written and verbal communication - key as you drive projects forward, prioritize work, facilitate the removal of obstacles, and escalate risks.

Desirable:

·       Physics knowledge including optics and/or thermodynamics.

·       Control theory professional experience including PID, filtering, and MPC.

·       Robotics skills (kinematics, computer vision, and motor control).

·       Performance optimization including native algorithm implementation & GPU programming.

·       Machine learning skills including CNNs and Gaussian processes.

·       Well versed in Gitlab and Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence, etc.) and CI/CD pipelines.

·       Knowledge of network architectures and security practices.

·       Embedded software experience.