Head of Product Engineering, Power Systems Controls & EMS

TAR•Austin, TX

9d•Hybrid

About The Position

TAR builds islanded, off-grid solar and storage campuses that power AI data centers, with no grid connection and no gas. On an all-inverter island the control stack is the plant: batteries form the grid, solar follows, and the data center is the load. As Head of Product Engineering, Power Systems Controls and EMS, you own that stack, from inverter control loops through the plant controller and supervisory EMS, and from offline EMT model to energized plant. Through first-campus COD you are the technical authority on how the island operates; after COD you build the in-house EMS and the team that makes GW-scale campuses repeatable. This is a player-coach seat: you write the specs and run the HIL campaigns yourself. You are based in Austin or willing to relocate, with regular West Texas travel through COD and on site for energization.

Requirements

6+ years of experience in plant controls, PPC, or EMS engineering for inverter-based power plants, at an EMS/PPC pure-play, a storage OEM, or an IPP controls group.
Graduate-level command of converter control, spanning grid-forming and grid-following architectures, droop and virtual inertia, current limiting and fault current behavior, and mode transitions: you have designed these loops, not just read about them.
Hands-on EMT study experience (PSCAD or similar) on inverter-dominated, low-short-circuit-ratio systems, with the depth to direct study consultants, challenge their assumptions, and turn results into vendor settings.
Full-lifecycle plant controller and supervisory EMS design experience, covering dispatch, reserve and state-of-charge policy, mode supervision, black start sequencing, and islanding, with standardized model libraries, points lists, and test procedures reused across a portfolio.
Real-time hardware-in-the-loop validation (OPAL-RT or Typhoon HIL) against shipping firmware, where you wrote the test protocols, benchmarked against simulation, and treated deviations as findings.
A specification-first vendor posture: you have defined fault current behavior, control bandwidth, and mode transitions before vendor selection, demanded white-box models, run witnessed FATs with authority to fail a unit, and governed firmware change control.
Islanded or off-grid experience at meaningful scale, plus commissioning under pressure: you have made a system work with no grid to fall back on and taken plants through FAT, SAT, and energization on live schedules.

Nice To Haves

Ph.D. or equivalent depth in power electronics or power systems.
First-of-kind projects where no playbook existed, such as grid-forming at scale, synthetic inertia, or weak-grid firsts.
Experience with AI or data center loads, including GPU transient characterization, battery buffering, or sizing for fast, non-smooth loads.
Experience building and leading an engineering function while staying technical, with standards in place before headcount.
Commissioning under demanding compliance regimes such as ERCOT, AEMO, NESO, or IEEE 2800.

Responsibilities

Write the controls architecture spec that partitions authority across the grid-forming battery controller, the grid-following PV plant control layer, our supervisory EMS, and protection: loop rates, comms protocols (Modbus, DNP3, IEC 61850), failure modes, who sets frequency, who curtails, who trips.
Own the controls exhibits in the battery supply, long-term service, and inverter contracts before they are signed, from points lists and EMT model delivery obligations to firmware change governance and ride-through settings, so the plant runs to our specification instead of vendor defaults.
Define the islanded operating philosophy: black start and energization of the medium-voltage network from dead bus, state-of-charge and reserve policy for overnight and multi-day weather, solar curtailment, N-1 response, and load shed.
Own the electrical and controls interface with our anchor AI cloud customer, setting voltage and frequency envelopes, IT load ramp limits, telemetry exchange, and the curtailment protocol that carries the reliability terms of the offtake.
Prove the control stack before hardware ships: direct our EMT study consultants, translate study results into vendor control settings, and stand up the real-time hardware-in-the-loop bench, FAT, and SAT protocols that validate shipping firmware against the models, with authority to fail equipment.
Lead controls commissioning of hundreds of MW of solar and grid-forming storage at our first campus in West Texas, from island formation and load pickup with the data center through trip testing and controls performance validation, on site for energization.
Scope the interim third-party EMS tightly, retaining ownership of data, points lists, and historian, then build the in-house EMS that replaces it and hire the real-time software team behind it.
Turn the first campus into the fleet controls reference design, with standard points lists, configuration management, a validated scenario library, and dispatch that enforces battery warranty limits and extends to multi-day storage, so each new campus commissions in weeks as we scale toward 5 GW by 2028.