Senior Research Engineer, Electrical

About Gridware

Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware's advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation.

This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit www.

Gridware.io.

Role Description

We are seeking a creative, hands-on Senior Research Engineer to lead ambiguous sensing and measurement problems with real-world impact.

You will become an expert in how our grid sensor signals behave in the real world. You will investigate sensing issues and performance via exploratory data analysis, hardware simulation, and bench debugging, design improvements, and validate improvements using test infrastructure you develop. You will define sensing requirements, develop measurement-chain improvements, and help mature new sensing capabilities.

This position focuses on measurement performance, validation, and technology transfer rather than product design and implementation.

Responsibilities

• Develop measurement performance requirements. Select and evaluate new sensors for current and new sensing capabilities.
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• Root-cause sensor signal issues from fleet to bench: use fleet telemetry (time-series + metadata) to isolate cohorts and failure signatures, test hypotheses via circuit simulation and benchtop reproduction, drive fixes design solutions, and partner with HW and FW engineering to implement them.
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• Design and validate measurement chain changes to improve physical phenomena observability.
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• Downsize on-device data. Develop signal compression techniques, selective data storage decisions, and sampling rate reduction strategies.
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• Develop and own test methods to characterize and validate sensor performance.
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• Develop hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure to reproduce the real-world physical phenomena Gridware technology detects. Run hardware-in-the-loop tests to validate changes to our tech stack (HW, phenomena detection algorithms).
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• Mentor team members. Raise the technical rigor of experiments, analysis, and validation work.
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• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and SW/HW/FW engineers.
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Required Skills

• MS in Electrical Engineering, Physics, or a closely related field plus 5+ years of relevant industry experience owning ambiguous sensing / signal-quality problems end-to-end, or PhD in one of those fields plus 2+ years of relevant industry experience.
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• Strong fundamentals in electromagnetics.
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• Track record of owning ambiguous sensing, signal-quality, or measurement-performance problems from framing through validation.
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• Scientific computing: comfortable writing analysis pipelines in Python, MATLAB, or equivalent to investigate and report system performance.
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• Experience collecting high-quality electrical measurements: have built and run custom measurement setups using standard lab instrumentation (scope/DAQ and related tools).
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• Strong technical judgment, communication, and cross-functional collaboration.
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• Experience leading technically complex work with multiple stakeholders and deadlines.
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Relevant Depth Areas

We do not expect every senior candidate to be equally deep in every area below. Strong candidates will usually bring deep experience in several of these areas.

• Sensor characterization and validation: led sensor performance evaluation from characterization, through test method development. Experience developing performance requirements and testing or validating sensing systems against those requirements.
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• DSP in embedded systems: have applied DSP to real sensor signals in embedded systems. Competent in C/C++ (or similar low-level languages), timing, sampling, and sensor communication interfaces.
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• Circuit simulation: have used SPICE-class simulation…