Staff Systems Engineer, Firmware Functional Safety

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

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
  
  

The U.S. base salary range for this position is $147,000 - 200,000 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 locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by location and individual factors including relevant skills, experience and education or training. This range correlates to the relative level of the candidate we believe we need for the role and may requi