Intern, Applications Engineering

Department: Commercial

Location: Scotts Valley

Employment Type: FullTime

What to Expect

Heron Power is a startup company building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to debottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and less costly hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything.

Our first focus goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron Power’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products over the past decade.

We understand that no one individual knows everything. We will all learn a lot together and from each other. We strive to build a collaborative, enriching environment conducive to personal, technical, and career growth. You can expect to work in a dynamic and collaborative environment, driven by first principles engineering, solving difficult problems.

Job Overview

The Applications team sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and market. We work shoulder-to-shoulder with design engineers, product managers, and GTM experts to ensure Heron’s products are easy to deploy, integrate seamlessly into complex power ecosystems, and consistently outperform competing solutions in real-world environments.

As an Applications Engineering Intern, you will work at the system level, shaping the key interfaces that allow our core technology to seamlessly integrate into solar, storage, and data center ecosystems. Working closely with design teams, you’ll model system behavior, evaluate protection strategies, benchmark competitive architectures, and contribute insights that directly shape product performance, reliability, and deployability in the field.

How You Will Contribute

• Develop system level models to investigate stability and resonances when connecting power converters/inverters to external impedance networks

• Perform short-circuit studies to estimate prospective fault currents and propose strategies to limit fault let-through energy

• Model and analyze protection devices, including current-limiting fuses, bypass thyristors, and solid-state circuit breakers

• Investigate and benchmark protection architectures across various industries to inform innovative, practical, and forward-thinking design decisions

What You Will Bring

We have a short list of must-have requirements. We prioritize a strong grip on first principles, hands-on skills, and a sense of initiative. Domain-specific knowledge and experience will help determine the career level for each hire.

Must-Have Requirements

• Fundamentals: You know the ins and outs of RLC circuits, understand resonance phenomena, and genuinely enjoy digging into Bode plots and frequency-domain behavior.

• Modeling Mindset: You can simplify complex physics-based systems into clean, first-principles models that capture the behaviors that actually matter.

• Curiosity: You're excited to step into the world of AI factories, data centers, and the power infrastructure that will enable the next era of AI adoption.

• Ownership & Autonomy: All you need is a task, an AI agent and a cup of coffee!

Nice-to-Haves

• Education: Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or Graduate degree (MS/PhD) in Electrical Engineering or a closely related field.

• Simulation Tools: Experience with circuit and system modeling tools such as LTspice, PLECS, MATLAB/Simulink, or Simscape.

• Power Electronics & Systems Knowledge: Working understanding of DC-DC converters, DC-AC inverters, medium-voltage equipment, and foundational power system protection principles.

If you are passionate about technology and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment, we would love to hear from you. Join us in accelerating the electrification of everything at Heron Power.