Principal Software Architect, Energy Systems

What to Expect   

Heron Power is a startup company building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to debottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and less costly hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything.  

Our first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products over the past decade.  

We understand that no one individual knows everything.  We will all learn a lot together and from each other.  We strive to build a collaborative, enriching environment conducive to personal, technical, and career growth.  You can expect to work in a dynamic and collaborative environment, driven by first principles engineering, solving difficult problems. 

Job Overview 

As a Principal Software Architect, you will lead the design and implementation of Heron Power’s industrial IoT software platform. You will define the system architecture spanning edge devices, cloud infrastructure, and user-facing applications used to manage, monitor, and operate grid-connected energy systems.

This role combines technical leadership with hands-on development. You will own core backend and data platform decisions while collaborating closely with embedded, hardware, and frontend engineers to ensure reliable, secure, and scalable end-to-end systems.

How You Will Contribute 

• Primary Ownership

• Architect, design, and develop scalable backend systems for industrial IoT deployments

• Build robust APIs and data pipelines to ingest, process, and store real-time telemetry from distributed edge devices

• Define field data protocols, pub/sub architectures, and edge-to-cloud communication patterns

• Design monitoring, diagnostics, and troubleshooting tools for large-scale distributed systems

• Define and implement secure authentication, authorization, and audit logging for industrial environments

• Establish software architecture standards, technical direction, and best practices across teams

• Collaborative Contributions

• Work closely with embedded software engineers on device integration, OTA updates, and commissioning workflows

• Contribute to intuitive, responsive frontend dashboards for visualizing system performance and sensor data

• Partner with DevOps and infrastructure efforts, including CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and observability

• Evaluate networking and cloud solutions to maximize system reliability, throughput, and uptime

• Support the development of commissioning tools for configuration, validation, and self-test of deployed systems

As a startup, team members are expected to collaborate across adjacent domains. While this role does not require deep expertise in every area, it does require strong systems thinking and the ability to lead technical decisions across boundaries.

What You Will Bring 

We’re looking for a driven, resourceful, and hands-on technical leader who is comfortable operating at both the architectural and implementation levels. You have a strong grounding in fundamentals, a bias toward practical solutions, and experience building real systems that operate reliably in the field.

Must-Have Requirements  

• Experience designing and deploying industrial IoT platforms managing fleets of distributed edge devices

• Proven track record of technical leadership, including leading cross-functional initiatives, major product launches, or large-scale system migrations

• Experience building monitoring, diagnostic, and troubleshooting tools for complex distributed systems

• Proficiency in Golang, Rust, or Java for building scalable backend services

• Strong understanding of RESTful APIs, WebSockets, and real-time communication protocols

• Experience with cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Hands-on experience with telemetry ingestion and stream processing, using systems such as Kafka, Kafka Streams, Flink, Spark, or cloud-native equivalents

• Solid understanding of cybersecurity best practices for industrial or mission-critical systems

Nice-to-Haves 

• Familiarity with SCADA/HMI systems and industrial networking protocols

• Knowledge of electrical systems, grid controls, or energy management systems

• Experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React, Vue.js, or Angular

• Exposure to machine learning or anomaly detection applied to sensor or telemetry data

If you are passionate about technology and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment, we would love to hear from you. Join us in accelerating the electrification of everything at Heron Power. 

Heron Power provides competitive compensation (salary and equity) and benefits. The salary for this role ranges from $200,000 to $250,000 per year.