Senior Test 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 community storage, the grid itself needs an overhaul. SPAN’s goal is to re-invent the grid from a clean slate to enable that transition, envisioning a grid made of distributed control systems and software as much as copper wires.

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 converts buildings from passive consumers in a centralized fossil fuel grid to active participants in the emerging distributed energy market.

SPAN’s unique commitment to clean-slate “right architecture” and our zealotry for top-caliber customer experience position us as domain leaders in envisioning the distributed grid and have allowed us to achieve rapid growth and high visibility in the industry in the two years since we launched.

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 does systems integration, root-causes problems, and builds internal infrastructure to keep our energy platform running smoothly and reliably.

As a test engineer, you will be hands-on, relying on diagnostics, code/architecture review and lab experimentations to ensure products reliable and consistent. You’ll experience a high degree of ownership over the SPAN lab, planning out and building out new test systems as the situation demands. You’ll drive what’s important to test and troubleshoot — collaborating with engineers across the organization, from firmware to product management to field service.

Responsibilities

• Test device firmware, integrations with inverters, batteries, and other energy hardware covering a broad range of regression and new-feature/integration testing
• Collaborate with Systems Engineering, Systems Integration, Hardware, Firmware, Software and Quality Assurance teams to ensure proper test validation and verification of the product
• Coordinate with Program Management to understand the test timeline and urgency
• Plan and build new test setups in the lab
• Develop and execute system test plans/cases, maintain clear documentation of test plans, test cases and results
• Work with design and integration engineers to reproduce and root-cause issues observed in the lab and the field
• Define and build manual and automated test fixtures with support from R&D team
• Maintain the lab setup (organize / label / etc)
• Experience working with / developing test automation

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 or related field or equivalent experience
• 5+ years' experience in test, QA, electrical design, integration, or applications engineering
• Exceptional analytical problem-solving skills, able to identify and surface issues within complex HW/SW systems
• Fluency with test and data acquisition equipment: multimeters, oscilloscope, logic analyzer, etc.
• Solid hands-on electrical skills (wiring, crimping, soldering, etc.)
• Solid understanding of low and high voltage electrical systems
• Comfort navigating a Linux environment (basic Bash commands, SSH, basic git commands, etc.)

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience working with / developing test automation
• Comfort writing Python or similar scripting languages
• Experience with basic data analysis and visualization: SQL, Jupyter Notebook, Pandas, NumPy, Grafana, TimescaleDB, etc.
• Fluency using DAQ or power analyzer
• Experience with inverters / batteries / PV/ electrical trade/ similar

The U.S. base salary range for this position is $132,300- $183,200 plus benefits, equity and variable compensation for Sales-related roles. This range represents SPAN’s good faith estimate of competitively-priced salary for the role based on national, real-time industry data from companies of a similar growth stage. This range reflects minimum and maximum new hire salaries for the role across US l