Staff Firmware Functional Safety Engineer

The Mission

The electrical grid was built to carry electricity unidirectionally from central fossil fuel plants to end consumers. As we transition to a renewable future built from rooftop solar and distributed storage, the grid itself needs a massive overhaul. Span’s goal is to build intelligence into our electrical wiring in order to reduce the cost and shorten the timeframe of this transition to an all-electric economy.

To accomplish this, we are upgrading the breaker panel — the humble box sitting at the center of every building’s electrical wiring — to monitor, control, and make decisions about energy. This lets us smooth out demand, eke more efficiency out of existing wiring, and link every electrical device in the home, from generation to storage to load, into a coherent, modern distributed system.

Thanks to our unique commitment to clean-slate “right architecture”, our zealotry for top-caliber customer experience, and our top-notch engineering team, we’ve been able to raise lots of capital, grow our team rapidly, quickly scale out our fleet of installed systems, and establish the “smart panel” as a brand new product category with competition from the likes of Schneider Electric.

The Role

Functional safety is a mission-critical part of Span’s long-term product roadmap. As we build out our portfolio of distributed energy systems and seek to eke ever more utilization out of existing infrastructure, we will need to be able to make hard functional-safety guarantees that our control systems can actively prevent electrical overload and keep critical loads powered. As our first functional safety systems engineer, you will play a critical role in driving Span’s functional safety efforts forward across a range of embedded products and features. You’ll serve as the primary owner for functional safety in multiple new hardware system designs, participating in the technology development process from concept all the way through to manufacturing. In this role you’ll have a key voice in how new products and programs come together, particularly around firmware architecture/design and be a key contributor to the vision of how to build a functionally-safe smart grid infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Develop functional and technical safety concepts for novel embedded control systems

• Lead functional safety activities during the full product development life cycle, including concept, requirements gathering, design, risk analysis, verification/validation, and release, working with a broad set of design engineers, program managers, and test engineers

• Perform FMEA, fault tree, HARA, and other risk assessment processes for new products and systems

• Work with Span’s top-notch systems, electrical, and firmware teams to design new systems to support functional safety along the full stack — from microcontroller selection to algorithms to communications architecture

• Write/own documentation packages for functional safety certification reviews

• Teach core functional safety concepts to our engineering and certification teams

• Serve as primary technical point of contact to our NRTL, supporting our in-house certification team in communications, negotiation, and new standards development

About You

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer science, or related field

• 5+ years of experience performing functional safety design for electronics and embedded systems

• Professional experience certifying products to ISO 26262, IEC 61508, UL/IEC 60730, and/or UL 1998; deep understanding of the standard and its underlying rationale

• Good people skills; experience running thorough, efficient FMEAs and other review processes

• Solid technical fundamentals in embedded software and electrical engineering; deep understanding of risks and misbehaviors in digital electronic systems

• Professional experience with risk mitigation strategies including static/runtime analysis, stress testing, coding guidelines (such as MISRA), software- and hardware-in-the-loop testing etc

• Familiarity with configuration and requirements management tools such as Polarion

• Strong analytical/data-driven problem solving skills as well as verbal/written communication skills

Bonus Qualifications

• Specific experience with distributed energy, solar inverters, power electronics, and/or lithium-ion battery design and/or safety evaluations

• Fluency with multiple different functional safety standards and ability to explain the differences between them

Life at SPAN

SPAN embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. 

Headquartered in San Francisco’s vibrant SoMa neighborhood, we are an eclectic group of creative thinkers who value open communication, teamwork, and a ‘make it happen’ approach to addressing complex challenges. 

Our CEO, Arch Rao⁠—former head of the Tesla Powerwall team⁠—fosters an energetic and collaborative environment, with a strong emphasis on maintaining work-life-balance across the organization.

We’re hiring talented individuals who are driven by success and are passionate about shaping the future of renewable energy. If that sounds like you, we’d love for you to consider joining the rapidly growing team at SPAN.

The Perks:

⚡ Competitive compensation + equity grants at a well-funded, venture-backed company

⚡ Comprehensive benefits (including medical; dental, vision, life and disability insurance)

⚡ Comfortable, sunny office space located near BART and Caltrain public transit

⚡ Strong focus on teambuilding and company culture (events, meet-ups, clubs)

⚡ Flexible hours and unlimited PTO

Our Mission & Values:

At SPAN, we believe that powering your home with clean energy should be a simple and delightful experience that is at its essence human-centered and technology-forward.

Our core values include:

• Making home energy more accessible, intuitive, and convenient.
• Enabling homes and vehicles to be powered by the sun.
• Building resilient homes with reliable power.
• All-electric everything.
• A more flexible & distributed grid.

Interested in joining our team? Submit an application today and we’ll be in touch with next steps!