Research Engineer, Electrical

Job Description

Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware's advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation. This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit www.Gridware.io.

Role Description

We are seeking a creative, hands-on Research Engineer to help us understand and improve how our products sense physical phenomena in the real world. You will investigate measurement performance, analyze signals and telemetry, evaluate sensors, run experiments and validations, and help mature new sensing capabilities. This position focuses on measurement performance, validation, and technology transfer rather than product design and implementation.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the development of measurement performance requirements. Evaluate new sensors for current and new sensing capabilities.
• Design and execute benchtop and full-scale experiments to characterize sensor and system performance.
• Support investigations from fleet observations through exploratory data analysis of fleet telemetry, bench reproduction, simulation, and test execution. Investigate signal behavior and communicate findings.
• Contribute to research of new sensing capabilities.
• Help develop validation methods and implementation-ready technical recommendations.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and SW/HW/FW engineers.

Required Skills

• MS in Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a closely related field and 2+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Strong fundamentals in electromagnetics, signal processing, or circuits.
• Hands-on experience contributing to physical experiments, measurement setups, hardware validation, or bench investigations.
• Scientific computing: comfortable writing analysis pipelines in Python, MATLAB, or equivalent.
• Experience collecting high-quality electrical measurements: have built and run custom measurement setups using standard lab instrumentation (scope/DAQ and related tools).
• Clear technical communication and documentation skills.
• Comfortable working on ambiguous technical problems and learning new domains quickly.

Relevant Depth Areas

You do not need to match every area below. Strong candidates will usually bring depth in one or two of these areas.

• Sensor characterization and validation: sensor performance evaluation from characterization, through test method development. Experience developing performance requirements and testing or validating sensing systems against those requirements.
• DSP in embedded systems: have applied DSP to real sensor signals in embedded systems. Competent in C/C++ (or similar low-level languages), timing, sampling, and sensor communication interfaces.
• Circuit simulation: have used SPICE-class simulation (LTspice/PSpice/ngspice/Spectre or similar) to model HW and perform investigations.
• Root-cause sensor signal issues: have investigated and solved signal/noise issues, e.g. identifying issues through exploratory data analysis, reproducing issues in simulation and on the bench, and implementing solutions.
• Physical sensing research: have researched new physical sensing capabilities using first-principles modeling, experiments, and sensor trade studies to evaluate feasibility and performance.

Bonus Skills

• Design and automate validation: have designed system validation plans with explicit acceptance criteria. Have built or owned repeatable test infrastructure.
• Experience with deployed IoT fleets (tens of thousands of devices) and developing "observability for sensor performance" e.g. telemetry design, health metrics, calibration drift monitoring.
• Experience optimizing sampling and signal processing on constrained compute devices to reduce power and storage.

$130,000 - $165,000 a year

This describes the ideal candidate; many of us have picked up this expertise along the way. Even if you meet only part of this list, we encourage you to apply!

Benefits

Health, Dental & Vision (Gold and Platinum with some providers plans fully covered)

Paid parental leave

Alternating day off (every other Monday)

"Off the Grid", a two week per year paid break for all employees.

Commuter allowance

Company-paid training