Senior Modeling & Simulation Engineer: Controls Integration

Mainspring Energy•Menlo Park, CA

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

Mainspring Energy manufactures and delivers fuel-flexible, low-emissions local power solutions that rapidly add new capacity and deliver reliable, affordable, and sustainable electric power. The company began commercial shipments of its Mainspring Linear Generators in 2020 and today has hundreds of megawatts in advanced development and field operations for leading Fortune 500 companies, data centers, and utilities. Mainspring also partners with global energy leaders including AEP, NextEra Energy Resources, Schneider Electric, and more. The core values that ground our work, guide our decisions, and connect us together: Pragmatic Optimism, Excellence without Ego, Proactive Collaboration. Job Overview: We have a high impact opportunity for a Modeling and Simulation Engineer to support the design, test, and manufacture of reliable and efficient linear generators at Mainspring Energy. On the system modeling and simulation team, you will have a central role in refining the way generators are designed by providing the tools through which the control system can be designed and validated. This role requires a quantitative physical understanding of the way things work combined with a passion and aptitude for software to bring that understanding to light.

Requirements

Engineering degree (Mechanical, Aerospace, Electrical, Chemical, etc) with a strong foundation in applied mathematics.
Strong technical and analytical skills with 5+ years of practical experience in more than one physical domain relevant to linear generators: thermodynamics, electrical systems, fluid dynamics, etc.
Familiarity with numerical techniques for modeling and simulation and their use within existing commercial packages (e.g. Simulink, Dymola, GT-Power, NPSS, etc).
Experience designing, writing, and validating custom models written in a high-level programming language, e.g. Fortran, C/C++, Python, Julia, etc.

Responsibilities

Determine the appropriate dynamic response of the generator system to a variety of control commands.
Write numerical models quantifying that behavior for simulation.
Coordinate with controls engineers and navigate code in C++ to understand the inputs and expected response of the controller to sensed generator behavior.
Generate test plans to investigate unknown system behavior or validate observations gleaned from other simulations.
Oversee the execution of those plans on the generator with support from the test team.
Write and debug solvers for dynamic systems written as ordinary differential equations (ODEs) or differential algebraic equations (DAEs).
Architect custom simulation environments and optimize simulations and develop reduced-order models capable of computing simulated time steps faster than real time on dedicated hardware.
Construct computational dynamic system models using appropriate conservation equations directly in high level programming languages, e.g. python, C++.
Participate in a robust development process following software best practices.
Participate in peer review of code written in support of modeling, control, and software work throughout the team.
Generate written documentation (presentations, reports, etc) of model design and simulation results for a variety of audiences at Mainspring.
Collaborating across technical domains, frequently integrating with executives and other leaders of software, mechanical design, and product development.