Principal Mechanical Engineering Manager

Our Mission  

SPAN develops products that accelerate the rapid adoption of renewable energy in the home. The flagship SPAN Smart Panel is the first true evolution for the traditional home electric panel, harnessing enhanced technology for metering, monitoring, and control. An expanded product suite of intelligent, integrated solutions radically lowers the cost and complexity of energy upgrades–including solar, batteries and EVs–empowering homeowners to be active, resilient, and informed players in the energy market.

At SPAN, we believe that powering your home with clean energy should be a simple and delightful experience that is at its essence human-centered and technology-forward.

Our core values include:

•  Making home energy more accessible, intuitive, and convenient.
• Enabling homes and vehicles to be powered by the sun.
• Building resilient homes with reliable power.
• All-electric everything.
• A more flexible & distributed grid.

The Role 

We are seeking a passionate and driven engineering manager to lead the development of market-leading hardware through all stages of a product’s development lifecycle. As a mechanical engineering manager, you will lead the execution of multiple programs and be accountable for meeting timelines and milestones. Candidates should be comfortable and excited to grow a team of highly skilled mechanical engineers to advance Span’s product portfolio. In this role, you will drive efforts to optimize our products, grow Span’s IP, and collaborate with our electrical, firmware, manufacturing, and reliability teams to implement technologies that electrify the home and delight our customers.

Expect ~4 days a week in the office in San Francisco. The Mechanical team’s success is based on tight collaboration with the cross-functional team, face-to-face meetings, and hands-on work with the prototyping and testing teams in our lab.

In this role, you will:

• Define system architecture and create engineering requirements for components and systems. Develop initial concepts for mechanical architectures.

• Downselect designs based on cost, feasibility, schedule impact, and reliability

• Be in charge of designs for optimized solutions and product schedules.

• Be able to step in and lead / mentor less experienced teammates when needed. Facilitate design reviews.

• Support executive staff with business analysis of research and development projects and manufacturing options e.g. outsource versus internal to Span and which components are ripe for vertical integration.

• Hands-on hardware analysis, bring-up, and thermal optimization.

• Own full product lifecycle: specification, design, prototype, certification, reliability, validation, and manufacturing.

About You

Required Qualifications

We are seeking a seasoned mechanical engineer or engineering manager who has:

• BS in Mechanical Engineering or similar field.

• Have 15+ years of experience developing hardware products for production. You have seen the full production cycle from ideation to manufacturing on multiple products.

• Have experience in static/dynamic structural, modal and thermal analysis using hand calculations as well as FEA software.

• Experience in generating mechanical requirements.

• Experience in the early stages of concept development across multiple design cycles.

• Effectively communicate technical concepts, ideas and knowledge to other team members, including mentoring junior members of the team.

• Significant experience in Solidworks 3D CAD, 2D detailed drawings.

• Hands-on approach to hardware bring-up, whether it be building a prototype or performing testing.

• Experience working closely with contract manufacturers and leading design for manufacturing.

• Remain engaged, proactive and positive in tough circumstances, owning assignments and taking full accountability for overall team success.

• Are passionate about renewable energy and energy storage.

Bonus Qualifications

We would love to hire someone who has:

• Experience leading a team, guiding multiple programs to success from the concept stage through manufacturing applying a disciplined project development methodology.

• Experience developing performance validation, environmental testing, and reliability testing.

• Knowledge of national and international safety and regulatory requirements such as UL, National Electric Code(NEC), IEC, and ISO.

• Design experience with products that connect to the electrical grid, NEMA 3R enclosures, and/or complex thermal requirements.

The U.S. base salary range for this position is $175,000 - $220,000 plus benefits, equity and variable compensation for Sales-related roles. This range represents SPAN’s good faith estimate of competitively-priced salary for the role based on national, real-time industry data from companies of a similar growth stage. This range reflects minimum and maximum new hire salaries for the role across US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by location and individual factors including relevant skills, experience and education or training. This range correlates to the relative level of the candidate we believe we need for the role and may require an adjustment for candidates of a different level. 

Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the location this role is based during the hiring process.