Automation Engineer

OUR MISSION SPAN IS ENABLING ELECTRIFICATION FOR ALL ⚡ WE ARE A MISSION-DRIVEN COMPANY DESIGNING, BUILDING, AND DEPLOYING PRODUCTS THAT ELECTRIFY THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS, AND SLOW THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE. - Decarbonization is the process to reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, from entering our atmosphere. - Electrification is the process of replacing fossil fuel appliances that run on gas or oil with all-electric upgrades for a cleaner way to power our lives. AT SPAN, WE BELIEVE IN: - Enabling homes and vehicles powered by clean energy - Making electrification upgrades possible - Building more resilient homes with reliable backup - Designing a flexible and distributed electrical grid Help Redefine Automation for the Modern Energy Grid At SPAN, we’re not just building smart panels — we’re engineering the infrastructure for a distributed, intelligent, resilient energy future. That demands zero-compromise validation and automation engineering across firmware, cloud services, hardware, and control logic. We’re looking for a Senior-level automation engineer who builds like a software engineer — someone who thrives on infrastructure-as-code, self-healing test systems, observable pipelines, and scalable developer tools and is ready to lead project-level initiatives and mentor junior teammates. This is not a QA role. This is systems engineering through the lens of automation. WHAT YOU’LL BUILD & OWN - Architect and evolve a modern, Python-based automation platform that enables deterministic testing for embedded devices and cloud-integrated energy systems. - Drive declarative and event-driven test orchestration using frameworks like Pydantic, Typer, and Click. - Design real-time diagnostics, telemetry, and fault-injection strategies powered by Datadog, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry. - Integrate deeply into CI/CD systems (Buildkite, GitHub Actions, Docker Compose) and lead optimizations for speed and reliability. - Own embedded-firmware validation pipelines leveraging HITL simulators, CAN bus, and OTA update frameworks (Mender, U-Boot scripting). - Define self-describing test metadata schemas and automate dynamic test generation from manifest files. - Develop code-first interfaces to signal generators, sensors, and power systems — keeping everything modular, reusable, and version-controlled. - Expose metrics-driven insights through APIs and dashboards and champion their adoption across engineering. - Mentor and guide junior engineers, sharing best practices in Python, test design, and systems thinking. CORE TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES YOU’LL USE - Python 3.11+, pytestDocker/Compose, Artifactory, OCI registries - GitHub Actions, Buildkite, Terraform, AWS CDK, Ansible - Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Grafana - AWS (S3, EC2, IoT Core, EventBridge), MQTT - Protocol Buffers (betterproto), YAML configuration - UV, Poetry, Black, Flake8, Ruff - CAN bus, PyOCD, PySerial, PyVISA - FastAPI, optional GraphQL exposure AI & INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION - LangChain, OpenAI API, Hugging Face Transformers - FAISS / ChromaDB for embedding search - Time-series anomaly detection integrated with Datadog / Grafana WHAT WE VALUE - You design test frameworks like production services — composable, observable, scalable. - You think in invariants, fault domains, and edge cases and communicate that mindset to the team. - You have a strong command of Python, embedded debugging, and cloud observability — and you enjoy teaching others. - You treat automation as a first-class catalyst for engineering velocity and product quality, not a safety net. - You’re motivated by measurable outcomes: reduced MTTR, higher release confidence, and faster developer feedback loops. BONUS POINTS - Leading contributions to open-source test frameworks or infrastructure tools. - Experience exposing tests via FastAPI or GraphQL. - Expertise in configuration-driven testing and metadata-first pipeline design. - Background in controls, power systems,