Intern, System Integration & Test Software

Heron Power•Scotts Valley, CA

About The Position

Heron Power is a startup company building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to de-bottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and less costly hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything. Our first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products over the past decade. We understand that no one individual knows everything. We will all learn a lot together and from each other. We strive to build a collaborative, enriching environment conducive to personal, technical, and career growth. You can expect to work in a dynamic environment, driven by first principles engineering, solving difficult problems—with a strong bias toward hands-on execution and learning by doing.

Requirements

Pursuing a BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
Strong programming proficiency in Python or Go; ability to read and understand embedded C firmware.
Hands-on experience designing, building, or operating electrical test setups for complex hardware—power electronics strongly preferred.
Comfort with bench power equipment and measurement methods: scopes, DMMs, power analyzers, electronic loads, DAQ, and sensors.
Strong debugging instincts and ability to drive root-cause closure with engineering partners.

Nice To Haves

Experience developing or integrating firmware on embedded systems (TI, STM32, ESP32, or similar).
Experience building AI agents or working with LLM APIs and agentic frameworks.
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines or automated test infrastructure.
PCBA design experience in KiCad or Altium.

Responsibilities

Contribute to our software test infrastructure for system integration and reliability testing — test architecture, hardware abstraction layers, and result reporting pipelines.
Write software tests that interact directly with hardware and firmware over CAN, UART, Modbus, TCP/IP — debugging signal integrity, protocol failures, and firmware edge cases.
Write concurrent, fault-tolerant software for our next-generation manufacturing test platform: Firmware Flashing, FCT, EOL stations running autonomously on the factory floor.
Build AI agents that manage test execution across facilities — initiating runs, monitoring anomalies, implementing test script and firmware changes in response to failures, and routing issues to humans
Build the operator and engineering facing management platforms: live tester status, pass/fail rates, station health, and agent activity across all facilities.
Own system-level integration testing for new firmware and hardware revisions — bring-up, functional validation, and regression coverage across power electronics, firmware, and connected systems.
Execute reliability campaigns—burn-in, power cycling, thermal stress, and abuse tests—and evolve them as we learn where the real failure cliffs are.
Drive fast debug loops during excursions: isolate, instrument deeper, reproduce, and verify that corrective actions eliminate the failure.
Design and build electrical reliability test benches for power electronics hardware—inverters, DC/DC converters, bi-directional power stages.
Specify, procure, and integrate lab equipment: programmable power supplies, electronic loads, DAQ systems, sensors, protection hardware, interlocks, and cabling.