Energy Modeling Engineer Internship - Spring 2023 & Summer 2023

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 

The Data Science team is looking for an intuitive and multidisciplinary energy modeling engineer intern to participate in the development of our simulated platform. In this role, you will be tasked with researching, designing, implementing, testing and validating one or multiple numerical models of appliances and equipment found in residential houses, including but not limited to EV charging station, photovoltaic panels, HVAC equipment and domestic appliances.

You will be working alongside data scientists to curate and analyze our customer data with the objective of extracting features that are relevant to your modeling need. You will also be expected to work with our R&D infrastructure team to set up and run experiments on home equipment that are designed to exploring modeling hypothesis and validating results. The role will give you broad exposure to many aspects of research and development: we’ll expect you to do a mix of literature review, data collection and analysis, experimentation and model development.

Responsibilities

• Conduct literature review and state-of-the-art research, evaluate modeling designs with an eye on accuracy, feasibility and speed.

• Come up with hypothesis about physical systems behavior and verify them by leveraging customer, experimental and open-source datasets.

• Implement models in our simulation framework, test and quantify their accuracy and computational efficiency.

As we are a startup, this list should be considered neither exhaustive nor complete. We’re excited for people to explore responsibilities outside their normal areas of expertise if the need or interest arises!

About You 

Required Qualifications

We are seeking modeling interns that meet the following requirements:

• Passion for clean energy technology and decarbonization 

• Pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, applied mathematics or equivalent fields

• Experience with first principles analysis of physical systems

• Excellent communication skills

• Experience using Python and SQL

Bonus Qualifications

We would love to find someone who has some of the following skillset:

• Experience in energy modeling pertinent to the operation of home appliances (hot and cold production, heat transfer, thermodynamics, batteries…).

• Experience with building energy or transient system simulation tools (EnergyPlus, TRNSYS, Modelica)

• Experience with Energy Management Systems, energy equipment control and algorithm

• Experience in data analysis, statistical analysis and data visualization

Life at SPAN

SPAN embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. 

Headquartered in San Francisco’s vibrant SoMa neighborhood, we are an eclectic group of creative thinkers who value open communication, teamwork, and a ‘make it happen’ approach to addressing complex challenges. 

Our CEO, Arch Rao⁠—former head of the Tesla Powerwall team⁠—fosters an energetic and collaborative environment, with a strong emphasis on maintaining work-life-balance across the organization.

We’re hiring talented individuals who are driven by success and are passionate about shaping the future of renewable energy. If that sounds like you, we’d love for you to consider joining the rapidly growing team at SPAN.

The Perks:

⚡ Competitive compensation + equity grants at a well-funded, venture-backed company

⚡ Comprehensive benefits (including medical; dental, vision, life and disability insurance)

⚡ Comfortable, sunny office space located near BART and Caltrain public transit

⚡ Strong focus on team building and company culture (events, meet-ups, clubs)

⚡ Flexible hours and unlimited PTO

Our Mission & Values:

At SPAN, we believe that powering your home with clean energy should be a simple and delightful experience that is at its essence human-centered and technology-forward.

Our core values include:

•  Making home energy more accessible, intuitive, and convenient.
• Enabling homes and vehicles to be powered by the sun.
• Building resilient homes with reliable power.
• All-electric everything.
• A more flexible & distributed grid.

Interested in joining our team? Submit an application today and we’ll be in touch with the next steps!