Our Mission

At SPAN, we are building products to drive the rapid adoption of renewable energy and electrification of home appliances. Our smart panel reinvents home electrical infrastructure and makes user-friendly energy management the center of the smart home, presenting intelligent load-balancing and revolutionary edge-of-grid controls to homeowners through the SPAN mobile app.

The Role

R&D Infrastructure at SPAN is a multi-skilled team able to create solutions for a wide variety of technological needs. Our skillset includes dedicated electrical, mechanical, fabrication, and software expertise. This enables rapid development of prototypes, experiment platforms, and hardware/software automation/monitoring frameworks. We value creative approaches to solving problems, and encourage building up new skills along the way. Our work accelerates SPAN R&D, and helps many other teams in hardware and software engineering on a daily basis.

As an R&D Hardware Intern at SPAN, you'll work closely with our mechanical, software, and electrical teams to design and build new test fixtures, support existing fixtures, and continuously improve test coverage, operator experience, and reliability. Your wide range of technical skills will help you understand the entire product and test stack, while your communication and documentation skills will help you join multi-disciplinary teams to successfully investigate and resolve issues.

A specific project and deliverable will be identified for you to complete during your internship, and may include some or all of the following:

• Participate in concept, planning, and design of electrical and mechanical test fixtures
• Build and validate fixtures including mechanical assembly, electrical wiring, automation equipment, and computer control
• Develop test scripting code in Python to resolve issues and bring up new fixtures
• Capture and analyze data from various tests and experiments

Required Qualifications

• Familiarity with Linux system operation (shell scripting, setting up new systems, etc)
• Familiarity with understanding and writing Python code
• Competent in basic electrical theory and understanding/drawing electrical circuits
• Comfortable understanding, drawing, and building from mechanical designs
• Ability to operate and maintain a wide variety of hand and power tools, shop tools, and lab equipment
• Experience with electrical assembly (wiring, soldering, DIN rail terminals, connectors)
• Experience with electrical test equipment (power supplies, power analyzers, oscilloscopes, etc)
• Strong interpersonal and communications skills
• A hacker’s instinct for making things work

Bonus Qualifications

• Ability to read and develop C source code for embedded systems
• Familiarity with database access, simple web development, accessing APIs
• Experience with home electrical wiring
• Experience with industrial electrical systems, control panels, safety interlocks, and guarding
• Experience with test-related hardware (sensors, data acquisition, pogo pin fixtures)
• Experience using 3D CAD and rapid prototyping tools

The Internship position has a duration of 12 weeks and will start in May or June of 2024. Candidates must be enrolled in an accredited college or university, and have not graduated prior to end of the Internship term.

The hourly rate for this role is $30/ hour for undergrad students, and $32/hr for Masters or PhD students.

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.

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:

⚡ Great opportunity to begin your career at a mission driven climate focused company

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

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

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

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

#