Renewables Electrical Engineer (Staff, Senior, or Principal)

Are you looking for an exciting job where you can put your skills and talents to work at a company you can feel proud to be a part of? Do you want a workplace that will challenge you and offer you opportunities to learn and grow?  A  position at Xcel Energy could be just what you’re looking for.

The below job summary and responsibilities reflect the staff engineer level role. The successfully chosen candidate will be placed at a level that is commensurate with their skills and experience as different skills and/or experience will be required at the senior and principal engineer levels.

This is a hybrid role with three days in the office and two days remote.

Position Summary

The Renewables Reliability Engineering team is responsible for elevating the reliability and availability of renewable energy systems while optimizing costs. The team leverages technical expertise, innovative engineering practices, data-driven insights and teamwork to deliver resilient, safe, and cost-effective solutions, resulting in operational excellence across the wind, solar, and battery storage portfolio.

We are seeking a highly skilled Wind Reliability Engineer to join our team. The role involves supporting substation maintenance, outages, and reliability improvement programs. Develop and apply wind turbine electrical and control subsystem expertise to an expanding fleet of wind farms across our three service territories. This individual will provide operational and performance engineering support for a 4GW+ fleet of Vestas, GE, and Siemens wind turbines. Willingness to occasionally climb wind turbines for educational and small project purposes is desired. This role will require occasional on-call availability to support plant outage troubleshooting and restoration. Familiarity with component failure rate calculations and other reliability engineering concepts is strongly preferred.

In this role you will have the opportunity to:

• Perform complex problem solving of technical issues to reduce equipment downtime. Equipment includes wind turbine subsystems, 34.5kV – 345kV substations, and 34.5kV underground collection system equipment

• Quantify equipment risk and develop corrective action plans to mitigate risk

• Analyze equipment failure rates, failure causes, and risk trends to prioritize maintenance and future investments

• Ensure implementation and optimization of equipment maintenance strategies

• Define critical spare parts strategy based on failure modes, asset criticality and failure history

• Perform root cause analysis and identify corrective action plans to prevent repeat failures.

• Provide technical and operational insights to influence new equipment design specifications

• Participate in industry networking and research new technologies to improve equipment reliability

• Leverage software and analytics to streamline processes and improve efficiency.

Under general direction, demonstrates complete understanding & wide application of engineering technical principle, theories, & concepts in the field. Independently determines & develops approaches to solutions. Receives technical guidance on complex problems; completed work reviewed for adequacy in meeting objectives. May lead small-medium non-critical projects or critical projects under direction of higher-level engineer/supervisor. May provide work direction to other professionals &/or staff. Represents the organization in providing solutions to difficult technical issues associated with specific projects. Frequent inter-organizational & outside customer contact. Demonstrates a broad knowledge & proficiency of precedents in the specialty area, a good knowledge of related specialties, & general knowledge of other related disciplines.

Essential Responsibilities

• Uses & applies technical standards, principles, theories, concepts, & techniques to perform activities/assignments that may include a variety of complex features such as conflicting design requirements, unsuitability of conventional materials or methods & difficult coordination requirements.

• Supports the development of technical documentation (including but not limited to designs, testing, calculations, reports, standards, etc.) Utilizes & may assist with the development of procedures requiring a broad knowledge & proficiency in a specialty area & has a general knowledge of related disciplines.

• Works under the general direction of a higher-level engineer or supervisor for routine engineering projects. Provide ongoing technical support for project activities within areas such as Operations, Maintenance, testing/diag