Research Engineer, Mechanical

Gridware • San Francisco, CA

19h • $165,000 - $180,000

About The Position

We are seeking a Research Engineer to join our Physical R&D team. You will develop and operate the analytical infrastructure for a new product that expands Gridware’s edge grid monitoring and observability platform.
This role is primarily computational. You will analyze novel measurements across our deployed fleet, build tools and workflows for investigation and interpretation, and help operationalize new measurement products for delivery to utility customers. You will need deep physical intuition for the behavior of mechanical systems to interpret what the measurements mean in the real world, guide how we validate them, and identify where performance limitations exist.

Requirements

• MS or PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Civil/Structural Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, or a closely related field and 2+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Strong fundamentals in solid mechanics: beam theory, stress analysis, structural loading. Able to reason from first principles about what physical conditions produce the stresses and deflections we measure.
• Scientific computing: comfortable building analysis pipelines in Python, MATLAB, or equivalent to investigate and report system performance across large datasets.
• Experience with exploratory data analysis—identifying patterns, anomalies, and cohort-level behavior in noisy real-world data.
• Clear technical communication and documentation skills.
• Comfortable working on ambiguous technical problems and learning new domains quickly.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with wood mechanics, timber engineering, or natural/biological materials.
• Experience with geotechnical or foundation mechanics (soil-structure interaction).
• Familiarity with GIS tools or spatial analysis for infrastructure data.
• Experience operationalizing analytical workflows into production systems (dashboards, automated reporting, alerting).

Responsibilities

• Continuously analyze and investigate sensor-derived measurements across our fleet. Identify anomalies, characterize measurement behavior across device populations, and develop the workflows and tooling to do this at scale.
• Develop the computation, investigation, and reporting infrastructure that delivers measurement products to utility customers on a recurring basis.
• Build and maintain analysis pipelines—using Python, SQL, and related tools—to connect sensor outputs to physical metadata and develop narratives about where our measurements are and are not effective.
• Support internal and field validation efforts by performing data analysis, preparing comparison datasets, and helping characterize measurement error across device cohorts.
• Collaborate closely with algorithm developers, product managers, and engineers to operationalize new capabilities from measurement to customer delivery.
• Communicate findings clearly through documentation, presentations, and technical reports.

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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 11-50 employees