Device Software Engineer (Build and Release)

Our Mission  

SPAN is enabling electrification for all

SPAN is mission-driven to design, build, and deploy products that electrify our built environment, decarbonize our world, and slow the effects of climate change.

• Decarbonization is the process to reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, from entering our atmosphere.

• Electrification is the process of replacing fossil fuel appliances that run on gas or oil with all-electric upgrades for a cleaner way to power our lives.

At SPAN, we believe in:

• Enabling homes and vehicles powered by clean energy

• Making electrification upgrades possible

• Building more resilient homes with reliable backup

• Designing a flexible and distributed electrical grid 

The Role

The Device Software Platform Team maintains the embedded Linux platform powering SPAN’s hardware products in energy metering, load management, and EV charging.

As a staff engineer on the team, you will:

• Support Linux image builds on our production release pipeline; lead initiatives centered around build performance, maintainability, and developer productivity and promote those initiatives to the firmware engineering team.

• Develop and improve package management and system/application/test configuration for Span’s application gateway.

• Partner with teams across SPAN — embedded software, manufacturing, security, and cloud infrastructure — to prioritize and release new image targets and platform capabilities.

Representative Projects

• Update our Linux image build process to support SecureBoot and a new firmware image signing process for separate development and production environments.

• Decouple upgrades of our Rust toolchain from upgrades of our base Linux distribution.

• Design and package production, development, and manufacturing images for a new product offering.

• Identity and promote opportunities to integrate new tools that improve the security, testability, and instrumentation of our production software.

About You

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience working in commercial software or open-source development.

• Fluency with Linux and Linux tooling.

• Experience with build, branching, release, triage, and automation best practices for high-quality production software releases in container-based development environments.

• Broad proficiency with the diversity of languages, toolchains, and CI/CD platforms used to build and distribute software projects. These include some subset of Python, Bash, Docker, Git, make, cmake, cargo, Poetry, Jenkins, Buildkite, Github Actions, AWS, etc.

• Problem-solving attitude, enthusiastic about maintainability/developer productivity, and able to independently debug complex software stacks.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

• Track record of taking ownership over projects and willingness to help others with theirs, from design and code review through to mentorship of new employees.

Bonus Qualifications:

Experience with one or more of:

• Proficiency or interest in embedded Linux build systems, such as Yocto/OpenEmbedded, Buildroot, and OpenWrt, as well as related software like U-Boot.

• Experience building maintainable tools and software in other languages, such as Python, Bash, Rust, or C/C++.

• Clean energy hardware in a multidisciplinary environment.

The U.S. base salary range for this position is $134,000- $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 in San Francisco county. 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 require an adjustment for candidates of a different level. 

Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the location this role is based d