Staff Backend Software Engineer

Our Mission  

SPAN is enabling electrification for all ⚡

We are a mission-driven company designing, building, and deploying products that electrify the built environment, reduce carbon emissions, 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

We are seeking a seasoned backend software engineer to join our team building the cloud-based glue that gives our users access to the rich information and controls provided by SPAN Panel, SPAN Drive, and future generations of our products. Our system collects a large volume of energy monitoring data that needs to be stored, processed and exposed in different ways for different end users from homeowners to utility operators. We're also opening up never-before available levels of control of the energy in the home that need to be accessed in secure and easy-to-use APIs.

You’ll join our cloud software engineering team and work with other engineers including data engineering, mobile, web, device software (firmware), and systems software teams. Working with the team, you’ll lead the design and implementation of systems that integrate our hardware, mobile apps, dashboards and external APIs. You'll work with product owners and other engineers to build features from start to finish. You'll bring deep infrastructure expertise to bear as a bridge between the Cloud and Platform teams — shaping Kubernetes strategy, networking architecture, and observability standards alongside building product features.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop new features and subsystems in the SPAN Cloud to support a variety of end users from homeowners, installers, fleet and utility partners.

• Bridge the Cloud and Platform teams on cross-cutting work involving service deployment, reliability, and infrastructure design.

• Work cross-functionally with product and design teams to learn about our customers, identify solutions and develop the features that solve their needs

• Collaborate between firmware, frontend and backend engineers on projects to seamlessly build a cohesive product

• Work in our Kotlin and TypeScript cloud with gRPC, REST APIs and GraphQL as well as communicating with our IoT devices over MQTT.

• Design APIs and data specifications for internal and external users, including large-scale B2B enterprise clients.

• Mentor and collaborate with team members, sharing knowledge and best practices to elevate the entire engineering organization

• Maintain and evolve services over time, including planning for scaling, major version upgrades, and long-term technical debt management

• Act as the Cloud team's subject matter expert on Kubernetes, service networking, and observability — advising on architecture decisions and standards.

Potential Projects

• Architect and co-ordinate full-stack solutions to enable new panel functionality such as geolocation-specific demand reduction to assist in reducing peak power draw.

• Design and build 3rd party cloud-based integrations with a variety of other hardware partners

• Scale our existing cloud and data infrastructure to support SPAN’s growing fleet

• Build and maintain event-driven systems using Kafka to process high-volume energy monitoring data

• Define and drive adoption of Kubernetes networking and observability standards (including service mesh and Datadog integration patterns) across the Cloud engineering team.

• Integrate payment processing systems including app store payments and subscription billing

About You

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a backend engineer with a track record of taking ownership of projects and features.

• Experience collaborating with engineers from multiple domains to complete projects.

• Experience with Cloud-native platforms like AWS, GCP, Azure (we use AWS).

• Experience collaborating with coworkers in shared code base using industry standard tools and processes including version control, type systems, linting and unit testing