Associate Director - ERCOT Market Subject Matter Expert (Part-Time​/ Contract

Associate Director - ERCOT Market Subject Matter Expert (Part-Time/ Contract)

• Full-time
• Service Region: UCC

We are a Digital Product Engineering company that is scaling in a big way! We build products, services, and experiences that inspire, excite, and delight. We work at scale - across all devices and digital mediums, and our people exist everywhere in the world (18000+ experts across 40 countries, to be exact). Our work culture is dynamic and non-hierarchical. We are looking for great new colleagues.

That is where you come in!

Role Overview

Nagarro is seeking an experienced ERCOT Market Subject Matter Expert to support a focused Proof of Concept for congestion driver attribution across the ERCOT nodal network.

The engagement aims to develop a Graph Neural Network-based solution that combines physical power-system fundamentals, market participant behaviour, and ERCOT transmission-network topology to identify and explain the key drivers of congestion.

The ERCOT SME will work closely with Graph ML engineers, data engineers, power-market analysts, and project leadership to ensure that the analytical models are grounded in ERCOT market principles and produce interpretable, actionable outputs.

Objectives of the Role

• Providing domain expertise on ERCOT market operations, congestion mechanisms, and nodal pricing.
• Guiding the interpretation of transmission constraints, shift factors, shadow prices, binding intervals, and congestion propagation.
• Supporting the definition and validation of congestion-driver categories.
• Translating ERCOT market behaviour into functional and analytical requirements for the data science and Graph ML teams.
• Ensuring that model outputs are understandable and relevant to power-market analysts and trading stakeholders.
• Validating congestion attributions against independently verifiable historical ERCOT market events.
• Supporting the assessment of the model’s readiness for future nodal price-forecasting use cases.

ERCOT Market and Congestion Expertise

• Explain ERCOT nodal market design, settlement-point pricing, transmission congestion, and Locational Marginal Pricing components.
• Analyse binding transmission constraints, contingency conditions, shift-factor exposures, shadow prices, and historical binding hours.
• Support the identification of congestion caused by generation outages, renewable oversupply, load concentration, transmission outages, contingencies, and market participant behaviour.
• Interpret participant-level and aggregated bid-and-offer disclosures within the context of congestion and shadow-price formation.

Model and Data Support

• Work with the Graph ML team to define appropriate node, edge, transmission, market, and temporal attributes for the ERCOT network graph.
• Review the use of ERCOT transmission models, shift-factor matrices, contingency files, line ratings, outage feeds, market disclosures, and historical congestion information.
• Define a practical taxonomy for congestion-driver attribution.
• Support the separation and interpretation of physical and behavioural contributors to observed congestion.
• Help establish business rules, assumptions, thresholds, and domain constraints for model development.

Validation and Interpretation

• Validate model-generated congestion attributions against known historical events, including documented unit outages, transmission outages, curtailment events, and contingency-driven constraints.
• Review propagation paths and assess whether identified node and interface impacts are electrically and commercially plausible.
• Evaluate the accuracy and usefulness of model explanations, confidence scores, and shadow-price attribution.
• Participate in back-testing reviews and assist in comparing model performance against baseline approaches.
• Ensure that model outputs can be interpreted by market analysts without requiring advanced machine-learning knowledge.

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Collaborate with the client’s trading, analytics, and power-market teams during architecture reviews and validation checkpoints.
• Participate in regular working sessions with Nagarro’s Graph ML engineers, data engineers, and project leadership.
• Present findings, assumptions, limitations, and…