Senior Manager, Grid Modeling

Breakthrough Energy is a network of entities and initiatives, including investment funds, nonprofit and philanthropic programs, united by a shared commitment to scale the technologies needed to reach net‑zero emissions by 2050. We accelerate innovation from lab to market, solve planning barriers to grid solutions, and bring together governments, research institutions, companies, and investors to expand and enhance clean‑energy investment. The GRIDS program focuses on improving and accelerating electric system planning and reducing the time to investment by tackling processes and tools for electric system design, building quality fundamental data inputs, and consistent and focused decision‑making tools to understand trade‑offs and options.

Breakthrough Energy seeks a technically grounded and execution‑oriented Senior Manager, Grid Modeling, to join our GRIDS program. The Senior Manager will help advance the technical core of the GRIDS program, with a particular focus on power system modeling. Primary focus areas are benchmarking and facilitating development and adoption of emerging open‑source grid modeling tools and data sources to increase transparency, interoperability, and accessibility of planning models that inform the buildout of reliable low‑carbon grids worldwide.

This role also scopes and stewards philanthropic investments in partner organizations advancing open‑source solver, tool, and methods development, and helps global utilities, grid operators, think tanks, and consultancies experiment with and adopt open‑source grid modeling tools. GRIDS is a small team; this role combines hands‑on technical work with partner activation: the Senior Manager will be the dedicated practitioner on benchmarking and pilot workflows while also ensuring that the substantial body of work executed through partners is well‑scoped, on track, and useful.

The ideal candidate combines deep planning expertise with strong program scoping and partner management skills, is comfortable moving between detailed technical analysis and external‑facing program leadership and brings an entrepreneurial mindset to a rapidly evolving global initiative. This role reports to the Director, Research and Analytics, GRIDS.

• Serve as the on‑team practitioner for the GRIDS Research and Analytics function—conducting hands‑on benchmarking of grid modeling tools and data sources, prototyping analytical workflows on open tools and public data, and surfacing performance and capability gaps between leading commercial tools and open‑source alternatives. Communicate findings clearly and concisely to GRIDS leadership to inform targeted philanthropic investment in closing those gaps.
• Design industry‑standard tool and data benchmarking programs in partnership with external collaborators, oversee the philanthropic funding of those programs, and help make their outputs broadly accessible so that modelers globally can compare what tools (commercial and open‑source) can do, how feature‑complete and performant they are, which solvers pair best with them, and what data sources are available and reliable—including public datasets and estimations of security‑constrained data.
  
  Monitor progress against milestones and synthesize outcomes for internal leadership and public communications.
• Scope, monitor, and steward grants and contracts to partner organizations advancing solver, tool, and methods development—for example, solver performance improvements, open‑source tool benchmarking, and AC power‑flow‑informed capacity expansion modeling. Define scope and deliverables, track progress, manage funding, and report up internally and publicly. The GRIDS team is small, so most technical execution will happen through partners; this role is a primary lever for ensuring that work is well‑scoped and lands.
• Lead targeted efforts to help anchor partners—utilities, grid operators, consultancies—move pilot or production planning workflows onto open‑source tools, identifying what is missing for adoption and translating those findings back into the GRIDS investment roadmap.
• Pressure‑test the analytical workflows GRIDS aims to…