Senior Optimization Engineer San Francisco, CA Learn more

The race to AI has become the race to power. Every breakthrough in artificial intelligence depends on one thing: access to electricity. But across the country, aging grid infrastructure and years-long interconnection queues are slowing the deployment of the data centers that will power the next generation of innovation. Solving this challenge isn't just about energy—it's about unlocking the future of AI.

At Verse, we're building the energy intelligence platform for the AI economy. Our software helps the world's largest energy consumers achieve faster, cheaper, and cleaner power by combining real-time control of energy assets with complete visibility into their energy portfolio. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, GV, Coatue, and NVIDIA, and built by pioneers in grid-scale batteries, energy markets, and enterprise software, we're redefining how the world's most ambitious organizations access and manage energy.

The Role

We're seeking an experienced
Senior Optimization Engineer to join our Data Science Team. In this role, you will lead the design, development, and deployment of optimization models that power our software platform across applications including electricity markets, renewable energy, and battery energy storage systems.

You will be responsible for developing production-grade optimization engines that solve complex operational and planning problems s role requires deep expertise in mathematical optimization, strong software engineering skills in Python, and experience building optimization models that integrate with production systems. The ideal candidate has significant experience in the energy industry, particularly electricity markets and battery storage optimization.

This position emphasizes technical leadership, ownership of complex optimization projects, and collaboration across engineering, product, and commercial teams to deliver high-impact optimization solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead End-to-End Optimization Engineering: Lead the development of optimization solutions from mathematical formulation through production deployment. Translate business requirements into scalable optimization models and implement them as robust, maintainable Python software. Design reusable optimization frameworks and services that integrate seamlessly into Verse's cloud platform and support long-term product development
• Optimization Modeling & Solver Development: Design and implement mathematical optimization models using linear, mixed-integer, quadratic, and related optimization techniques. Formulate robust models for scheduling, dispatch, planning, and operational decision-making, and improve solver performance through model reformulation, decomposition methods, warm starts, heuristics, and parameter tuning to ensure scalable, production-ready optimization solutions.
• Energy Systems Modeling: Develop optimization models for electricity markets, battery energy storage systems, renewable energy assets, and other distributed energy resources. Translate market rules and operational constraints into mathematically rigorous optimization formulations.
• Software Engineering & Productionization: Write clean, well-tested, and maintainable Python code following modern software engineering best practices. Contribute to architecture decisions, testing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment of optimization services.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product managers, software engineers, data scientists, and commercial stakeholders to understand business requirements and deliver optimization capabilities that integrate into customer-facing products.
• Technical Leadership: Mentor junior engineers, establish best practices for optimization modeling and software development, conduct code reviews, and help shape the technical direction of Verse's optimization platform.

What We're Looking For (Minimum Qualifications)

• 5+ years of professional experience developing mathematical optimization models in production environments
• Demonstrated experience independently leading complex optimization projects from formulation through deployment
• Professional experience developing production software in Python
• Experien…