Software Engineer San Francisco Bay Area

About this role

Software Engineer

Job type : Full time

Department : Engineering

Location : San Francisco Bay Area

Workplace : On site

Team : Software Engineering

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Mission

TAR’s mission is to power intelligence for the world. We are building the world’s first off-grid power plant for data centers powered by renewable technologies.

We firmly believe AI should be built in the US for the benefit of all people. For that, power must be fast, clean and scalable. We are singularly focused on delivering GW-scale power faster than anyone has ever done, by rethinking every layer of the stack.

We vertically integrate to solve every bottleneck, from racking systems to power electronics to dispatch algorithms to on-site construction.

Leave your mark on the future of civilization-scale energy infrastructure.

Company

TAR is both a hardware and software company, we are building out massive, critical, physical infrastructure. TAR is working directly with one of the largest compute providers to scale and deploy 5GWs by 2028.

We operate on...

• High ownership. High Agency. Own project end-to-end. Great people don’t need to be managed.
• Speed. We achieve great things on incredible timelines. We push ourselves to go faster.
• First principles. No ego. No hierarchy. Challenge every assumption.
• Passion. Solving the energy problem is one of the largest challenges that faces the world now and in the future.

About the role

As a Software Engineer, you will build software that helps us design, construct, and operate power campuses. Our work spans simulation and optimization, geospatial data and automated design, construction and operations applications, and energy management.

You will go deep in one or two areas and own meaningful systems from understanding the problem through implementation and use. You will work directly with domain experts, make technical decisions, and follow through when your software meets real users and physical equipment.

We are a small team with a broad scope, spanning product development, infrastructure, data, and developer tools. This role is based at our San Francisco engineering office.

Responsibilities

Depending on your area of ownership, your work may include:

• Build simulations of PV, inverters, batteries, controls, and data-center loads to evaluate equipment sizing, dispatch strategies, economics, degradation, and outage scenarios. Work with power systems engineers to turn their models and assumptions into tools that can evaluate many configurations.
• Build pipelines that turn LiDAR and terrain data, soils information, parcel boundaries, irradiance datasets, and environmental constraints into inputs for automated site design. Develop tools for grading and racking layouts, DC block topology, cable routing and losses, equipment placement, bills of materials, and engineering deliverables.
• Build construction and operations applications that track piles, trackers, and modules from the laydown yard to their installed positions. Connect approved designs, inventory, and work packages to deployment, and maintain the site’s as-built record for construction teams and ongoing operations.
• Develop energy-management software, SCADA and equipment interfaces, telemetry, and testing infrastructure alongside power systems engineers. Help implement and test dispatch and state-of-charge management, coordinate inverters and batteries, and verify system behavior during equipment failures or lost communications.

Across your work, you will:

• Work directly with domain experts and users to clarify problems, define useful scope, and make practical engineering trade-offs.
• Own implementation, testing, release, and ongoing improvements. Investigate failures, incorporate feedback, and build verification appropriate to how the software will be used.
• Create clear interfaces and maintainable code, contribute to design and code reviews, and surface dependencies or delivery risks early.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of independently delivering and maintaining production systems that other people depend on.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Depth in at least one of TypeScript, Python, or Rust, with the ability to learn other languages and tools as the work requires.
• Experience taking a meaningful project from an unclear request to a working system.
• The ability to investigate unfamiliar problems, explain technical trade-offs, and verify that a solution works.
• Comfort working directly with people outside software engineering and learning enough about their domain to make sound decisions.
• Willingness to take responsibility beyond the first implementation, including debugging, documentation, and ongoing operation.

Nice to have

• Experience with numerical simulation, optimization, computational geometry, or geospatial data.
• Experience building user-facing applications, data pipelines, or production cloud systems.
• Familiarity with industrial controls, SCADA, equipment protocols such as Modbus or DNP3, or software integrated with physical equipment.
• Experience in energy, robotics, construction, or another engineering-intensive industry.

Relevant experience will depend on your initial area of ownership. You do not need expertise across every domain listed above.

Salary and Benefits

• Up to $15K relocation bonus
• Unlimited PTO
• Health, Dental, Vision insurance
• $1K monthly stipend for meals

About the role

As Software Engineer, you own the software that lets us design, simulate, and operate power campuses faster than anyone else: high-fidelity digital clones of entire campuses, the geospatial data pipelines that feed automated site design, the design automation itself, and the in-house energy management system that will run the island. You will not do all four at once; expect to go deep on one or two and have real influence over how the rest get built. We have an engineering culture focused on building. Small team, wide scope. You will own systems end to end and be the person accountable when they meet the physical world.

Responsibilities

• Build high-fidelity simulations of an entire campus, spanning PV, inverters, batteries, controls, and the data center load, so sizing decisions, dispatch strategies, degradation assumptions, and outage scenarios get stress-tested before we pour a single foundation.
• Work alongside our power systems engineers and outside stability consultants, translating what they know into models that run thousands of times a day instead of once a quarter.
• Build data pipelines that ingest and normalize the raw inputs a site design depends on, including LiDAR and DEM topography, geotech and soils data, parcel and constraint layers, irradiance and TMY datasets, and environmental overlays, into a clean geospatial substrate that automated layout can consume.
• Turn a site boundary and a set of constraints into a buildable design: grading and racking layouts, DC block topology, cable routing and losses, equipment placement, BOMs, and the drawing artifacts external engineers and EPC partners actually need.
• Compress a design cycle that takes months into one that takes days, so we can evaluate hundreds of site variants instead of three.
• Build the Construction OS: the system of record that turns an approved design into a built campus, tracking every pile, tracker, and module from the laydown yard to installed position, assigning inventory and work packages to the deployment robots, holding the live as-built state of the site, and carrying that same data forward into O&M once the campus is energized.
• Help take our energy management system in-house: real-time control, SCADA and telemetry integration, and testing infrastructure for the brain of an islanded campus, which holds frequency and voltage, manages state of charge against a load that never sleeps, coordinates inverters and batteries, and degrades gracefully when something fails.
• Own the operational safety work that comes with software controlling physical assets.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of shipping systems that other people depend on. We work in TypeScript, Python, and Rust, and we expect real depth in at least one of them.
• The ability to work directly with domain experts, from power systems engineers to civil engineers and project developers, and turn their tacit knowledge into software.
• You should want to understand how a power campus works, not just how to model one. The engineers who thrive here end up knowing why a tracker row is spaced the way it is and what an inverter does when the grid it was designed for is not there.
• Bias toward first-principles reasoning and toward shipping: we have projects in construction, and software that is not in use is not finished.

Nice to have

• Prior work in solar, storage, microgrids, or utility-scale power, including familiarity with PVsyst, PSCAD/EMTP, PLEXOS, SAM, or similar.
• Experience with SCADA, Modbus/DNP3, IEC 61850, or industrial control stacks.
• Experience with CAD or geometry pipelines, or generating engineering deliverables programmatically.
• Production experience with commercial or open-source solvers (Gurobi, HiGHS, CPLEX, OR-Tools) and a sense of when a formulation is the problem rather than the solver.
• Background in robotics, autonomy, or another domain where software has to survive contact with the physical world.
• Comfort in at least one of: numerical simulation, geospatial and GIS data, real-time or embedded control systems, or computational geometry and optimization.

Salary and Benefits

• Up to $15K relocation bonus
• Unlimited PTO
• Health, Dental, Vision insurance
• $1K monthly stipend for meals