Backend Engineer - Market Integrations

Are you interested in building the technical foundation of the worldwide transition to clean energy? Do you enjoy working with a highly motivated and talented team to deliver mission critical software? We've got systems to take signals from every "electrical" market in North America and send notification, set off alarms and trigger automated responses in thousands of facilities throughout them all. Everything from a retail store to the largest steel foundries on the continent get turned on and off depending on real time electrical grid conditions.
As an engineer on the market integrations team, you will be building out services to make our modern, cloud-based infrastructure look like a collection of power plants; mostly to wholesale electricity markets(RTO/ISOs), less often to utilities. 
Market integrations come in all shapes and forms. Some include real-time telemetry pipelines with end-to-end latency requirements of <30 seconds and require a heartbeat increment every second to ensure health of the system at all times, some will simply send an email 30 minutes prior to start of the dispatch and use utility data over a month later to determine dispatch performance. What is true of all of them is: they must be resilient to failure and transparent to debug. When time comes to dispatch, there is rarely an opportunity for mistakes, so all the thinking and preparation is done ahead of time.

Some real world examples of work we've been doing lately that might help you get a better idea of what we do on the team

• Complete a real-time integration in the CAISO market to allow Voltus participation in operating reserves. The project was in collaboration with:
• data team to setup the telemetry pipeline
• infrastructure team to setup market-request custom networking 
• energy markets team, who helped us work with the market directly and interpret the documentation
• read more about this integration in our blog


• Collaborate with the data team to create a market-agnostic telemetry streaming pipeline and build pluggable stateless translator services to communicate real-time telemetry data to wholesale electricity markets over SCADA protocols.
• Provide a clean scheduling API for the Partners team which encapsulates market-specific complexities and propagates scheduling information as offers to wholesale markets.
• We are currently working on automating a manual process for registering a large number of resources ( currently, a partially-automated process supervised by the energy markets team).
• Create beautiful and intuitive dashboards which can be used by energy markets, dispatch ops and engineering alike to judge the state of a given integration and serve as a source of truth for internal operational data.
• 
  
• In general, the market-integrations team is acutely aware of how supporting too many "special snowflake" services can be a huge operational burden. We strive for uniformity and improve our process and architecture with every new integration, making the pieces more universally pluggable. Generalize well, but not too early.

Teams we collaborate with:

• 
  
Non-engineering
• energy markets team - our internal market experts. We collaborate on market entry for new programs; energy markets lead help us understand market rules, helps find relevant documentation and 
• dispatch ops team - supervise our giant dispatch machine and ensure all runs smoothly. They are the largest stakeholders for existing integrations and hold us accountable for building resilient, reliable, predictable systems.
• product team - amazingly organized and aware, product team helps us stay aligned with the company goals

Engineering
• partners-integration team - the counterpart to market integrations, who deal with the external requirements of interfacing with large customers. We frequently collaborate on creating internal APIs for the partners team.
• data team - keepers of information and developers of our internal data warehouse. Data team is a frequent collaborator on real-time integrations.

What's important to us in a candidate

• Self initiated and curious, someone who is always looking for ways to improve our applications and infrastructure
• Can work independently and thoughtfully allocate time among projects
• Communicates well with others, especially important in a remote team
• Interested in cntributing to an engineering culture that is positive, welcoming, and psychologically-safe
• Awareness, empathy, and intentionality
• Wants to learn more about the energy industry

Technologies we use

• Go, Python
• Postgres, Kafka, Redis, S3
• AWS, Docker, Nomad, Consul, Vault

At Voltus, we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer because we recognize that a diverse organization begins with a diverse candidate pool. This means we do not tolerate discrimination of any kind and are committed to providing equal employment opportunities regardless of your gender identity, race, nationality, religion, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, disability status, or marital status.