Senior Engineering Manager

Uplight

18h•$198,000 - $240,000•Remote

About The Position

Uplight is creating a new category of energy. We make software that manages energy resources in homes and businesses—including things like smart thermostats, electric vehicles, solar panels, storage batteries, heat pumps, and even people’s behavior—to generate, shift, or save energy to balance the grid, making it more efficient and reliable. This creates clean energy capacity that can be used by the power grid instead of burning more fossil fuels. Our solutions accelerate the transition to clean energy and save money for energy customers. We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager - Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Optimization and Orchestration to drive our technology forward and help us lead the clean energy revolution. Uplight’s VPP platform provides AI-powered monitoring, forecasting, and dispatch tools to aggregate and orchestrate Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) across multiple asset classes, customer segments, and device types. Your work will directly enable grid operators to draw on flexible, dispatchable capacity at scale to support a variety of critical grid services. In this senior role, you will champion a "full service ownership" culture, taking features from design and development all the way through deployment, infrastructure management, and operational health.

Requirements

Proven track record of driving agile delivery practices (e.g., iterative development, continuous feedback, retrospectives) that improve team velocity and product quality
Ability to engage with technical discussions at a system and architecture level
Desire to manage a team of ~4-8 engineers
Empathy for your team and customers as we create outcomes that matter
Strong communication skills and the ability to set clear expectations and priorities

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP), distributed systems, or modern SaaS architectures
Experience using or building upon Databricks
Understanding of cost fundamentals, uptime, performance, and approaches to measure and improve them
Experience in energy, utilities, grid technology, or climate tech
Prior hands-on engineering experience (designing, building, or testing software)

Responsibilities

Lead a team of 4-8 engineers, providing technical and operational guidance while investing in individual growth
Partner with product management to scope and deliver solutions that align with our goals while balancing the needs of the team
Collaborate with other Engineering Leaders to identify and solve challenges across the engineering team
Make decisions using a Data Driven approach (e.g. DORA, delivery metrics, user feedback, system reliability) to continually improve our software and how we work
Balance technical trade-offs with business needs to deliver sustainable, long-term solutions