Software Engineer

TAR•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

As a Software Engineer at TAR, you will own the software that enables the design, simulation, and operation of power campuses with unprecedented speed. This includes developing high-fidelity digital twins of entire campuses, creating geospatial data pipelines for automated site design, building the design automation tools themselves, and developing the in-house energy management system for islanded operations. While you won't tackle all these areas simultaneously, you can expect to specialize in one or two, significantly influencing their development. Our engineering culture emphasizes hands-on building, with a small team operating across a wide scope. You will be responsible for systems end-to-end, bridging the gap between software and the physical world.

Requirements

Strong software engineering fundamentals and a proven track record of shipping systems used by others.
Proficiency in TypeScript, Python, or Rust, with deep expertise in at least one.
Ability to collaborate directly with domain experts (power systems engineers, civil engineers, project developers) and translate their knowledge into software.
A desire to understand the intricacies of power campus operations beyond just modeling.
Bias towards first-principles reasoning and shipping functional software.
Engineers who thrive here gain a deep understanding of system design, such as tracker row spacing and inverter behavior in grid-disconnected scenarios.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in solar, storage, microgrids, or utility-scale power.
Familiarity with tools like PVsyst, PSCAD/EMTP, PLEXOS, or SAM.
Experience with SCADA, Modbus/DNP3, IEC 61850, or industrial control stacks.
Experience with CAD or geometry pipelines, or programmatic generation of engineering deliverables.
Production experience with commercial or open-source solvers (Gurobi, HiGHS, CPLEX, OR-Tools) and an understanding of formulation issues.
Background in robotics, autonomy, or other fields where software interacts with the physical world.
Comfort in at least one of the following: numerical simulation, geospatial and GIS data, real-time or embedded control systems, or computational geometry and optimization.

Responsibilities

Build high-fidelity simulations of entire campuses, including PV, inverters, batteries, controls, and data center loads, to stress-test critical decisions before physical construction.
Collaborate with power systems engineers and stability consultants to translate their expertise into models that can be run frequently.
Develop data pipelines to ingest and normalize site design inputs such as LiDAR, DEM topography, geotech data, parcel constraints, irradiance, and environmental data into a usable geospatial substrate for automated layout.
Automate the design process, transforming site boundaries and constraints into buildable designs including grading, racking layouts, DC block topology, cable routing, equipment placement, BOMs, and necessary engineering drawings.
Compress design cycles from months to days, enabling the evaluation of hundreds of site variants.
Build the Construction OS to manage the transformation of approved designs into built campuses, tracking components from inventory to installation, assigning work to deployment robots, maintaining the as-built state, and carrying data forward to Operations & Maintenance.
Contribute to bringing the energy management system in-house, focusing on real-time control, SCADA and telemetry integration, and testing infrastructure for campus operations, including frequency and voltage management, state of charge coordination, and graceful degradation handling.
Own operational safety aspects related to software controlling physical assets.