Senior Performance Engineer

Job Description

Senior Performance Engineer

About the company

This Renewables Organization is a national developer, financier, owner, and operator of solar energy systems benefiting businesses and communities across the country. They specialize in development and structured finance for solar assets, securing sponsor and tax equity alongside project-level debt financing to realize the highest value for its clients.

Their proven dependability, experience within the industry, and established portfolio of 313 MW of operational and under-construction projects combined with its ~1 GW of early and late-stage projects, underpin its success as one of the country’s leading solar developers and owners.

This developer strives to continue this growth while staying committed to corporate social and environmental responsibility, as we sustain our environment for future generations through solar power. We view this responsibility as a fundamental part of our business, and we consistently work to inspire these values in our employees, partners, and customers.

To support the company’s ambitious growth goals, they secured a partnership in 2023 with an independent infrastructure equity fund manager currently controlling more than €16 billion of investments. This partnership will support and accelerate the expansion of this developer’s objectives.

About the role

This position will work within the Asset Management team, which is responsible for the technical management of a growing portfolio of distributed generation and utility-scale projects located across the United States. This position reports to the Director of Technical Asset Management. As a senior performance engineer in the renewable industry, you will be responsible for analyzing and interpreting data related to power plant performance, modeling, and prediction. Your work will help inform strategic decision-making and improve operational efficiency in the industry. You will collaborate closely with engineers, O&M teams, project managers, and business stakeholders to identify opportunities for data-driven insights and solutions.

Primary Responsibilities

• Collect, clean, and analyze large data sets related to power plant performance, modeling, and prediction.
• Develop predictive models and algorithms to forecast power plant performance and troubleshoot underperforming PV systems, identify potential component failures and modeling issues, and recommend corrective actions to meet guaranteed capacity and energy production targets.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop and implement data-driven solutions that improve operational efficiency and reduce costs.
• Design, implement and maintain APIs to enable easy access to data from various sources such as Data Acquisition System (DAS), equipment manufacturers (e.g. inverter, transformers), National Weather Services, third party weather data providers, etc.
• Experience developing and executing Extract, Transform, Load processes with SQL databases.
• Lead in the development of programming code to automate internal and external reporting requirements.
• Work with stakeholders to identify their requirements for data analysis, model development, and performance optimization, and work with the team to deliver solutions that meet those requirements.
• Communicate findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders in a clear and concise manner.

Basic Qualifications

• Master’s degree in a relevant field, such as computer science, data science, math, physics, and/or engineering such as electrical and 5 years of combined experienced in performance engineering and data scientist in a similar role.
• Domain expertise in the solar energy industry.
• Proficiency in Python, R, SQL, and/or other programming skills
• Proficiency in the use of business intelligence tools and other analytical tools (e.g. PowerBI, Tableau, Plotly, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib)
• Proficiency in MS Excel (inc. VBA and/or macros).
• Proficiency with photovoltaic performance modeling tools such as PVsyst, PVLIB Python, NREL SAM and other PV software and models.
• Proficiency and demonstrated experience working with real-world data in all phases of the data science life cycle—data compilation, data exploration, feature selection and engineering, training, testing and communication of results.
• Two years of project management experience.
• Data mining experience.
• Strong critical thinking skills and ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.

The ideal candidate will have

• Experience working in the power industry, specifically in performance analysis and modeling
• Experience on conducting performance evaluation of PV plant performance testing by using standards such as ASTM and IEC.
• Knowledge of machine learning algorithms and statistical methods.
• Knowledge of solar monitoring platforms (AlsoEnergy, GPM, Powerfactors, etc.)
• Experience working in a cloud environment (e.g. AWS, Azure).
• PMP or other project management certification