Systems Integration Engineer

Our Mission  

SPAN develops products that accelerate the rapid adoption of renewable energy in the home. The flagship SPAN Smart Panel is the first true evolution for the traditional home electric panel, harnessing enhanced technology for metering, monitoring, and control. An expanded product suite of intelligent, integrated solutions radically lowers the cost and complexity of energy upgrades–including solar, batteries and EVs–empowering homeowners to be active, resilient and informed players in the energy market. 

The Role

We aim to establish the Span panel as the center of home energy and the backbone of the renewable distributed grid. To accomplish this, we will have to integrate with everything — or at least with every solar inverter, every storage battery, and every high-power smart appliance we can get our hands on.

Designing and sustaining this broad and high-quality portfolio of technical integrations is the core mission of our Systems team. Our team drives systems architecture, does systems integration, root-causes problems, and builds internal infrastructure to keep our energy platform running smoothly and reliably.

As our lead systems integration engineer, your responsibility will be to own the integration between the Span panel and our growing list of technology partners. You will become our in-house expert on all aspects of the devices with which we integrate (e.g. power electronics, firmware, communications) and how our panel coordinates with them. You’ll be involved through the entire integration process, from initial design to lab testing and finally to remote monitoring in the field.

Responsibilities

• Develop a deep understanding of the inverters, energy storage systems, EV chargers, and appliances we’re integrating with: read their manuals cover to cover, install and operate them in the lab
• Work with the firmware and software teams to design integrations (write specs, draw state machines)
• Take point on lab testing: verify that your integration designs work; try to break things; characterize the integrated system (e.g. response time)
• Coordinate with engineering teams from other companies: write integration proposals, serve as technical point of contact
• Use fleet data to monitor device health in the field and solve problems
• Reproduce and root-cause issues from the field; work with the team to develop and test fixes

Note: We’re a startup, so while this list is broad, it’s still just a start; you’ll end up wearing many hats during your time at Span.

About You

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer science, or related field
• 5+ years' professional hands-on experience with energy storage, inverter, EVSE, or similar hardware products (testing, firmware/hardware development, or systems integration)
• First-rate understanding of electromagnetism, power electronics, and electrical engineering fundamentals; comfort reading PCBA schematics
• Comfort using and reasoning about all manner of communications protocols (REST, CAN, Modbus, etc)
• Extensive experience using oscilloscopes and other electrical instrumentation (logic analyzer, power analyzer, etc)
• Comfort working with embedded systems — reading source code, reasoning about state machines, etc.
• Solid hands-on electrical skills (wiring, soldering, etc.)
• Comfort working with SQL and data visualization tools
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• Ability to understand and explain complex problems simply and effectively
• A hacker’s instinct for making things work

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience working with field data and doing remote troubleshooting/diagnostics
• Experience programming in Python, Javascript, other scripting languages
• Numerical programming experience (PANDAS, R, MATLAB)
• Experience writing firmware / low-level languages (C, Rust) and using FreeRTOS or similar embedded operating systems

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!