Software Engineer, Full Stack - Founding Team at Spark | Y Combinator
About Us ⚡️
Join us to accelerate the energy transition with technology.
At Spark, we’re building the AI engine behind the next generation of renewable energy infrastructure. Our mission is simple yet ambitious: To help renewable energy developers build solar farms, battery storage plants, and related projects more efficiently. If you’re excited to see your products directly accelerate the energy transition, read on.
We’re already powering decision-making for industry leaders like Colliers Engineering & Design (2k+ employees), Standard Solar (Brookfield), Pine Gate Renewables (Blackstone), and Cypress Creek Renewables — developers with over $15B in clean energy financing and pipelines that will deliver 70GW+ of clean power to millions of households per year.
One of the biggest challenges in renewable energy development is navigating regulations and local factors that can make or break a project. We build applications to find, analyze, and apply this critical information in every jurisdiction in the United States.
The Team 💻
Our team combines leadership experience from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Brex, WeaveGrid, and the Department of Energy, with deep backgrounds in both AI and energy. We’re a small, in-person team based in San Francisco, working together 5 days a week. We believe tight collaboration is a superpower at this stage.
We’re well-funded by world-class tech and energy investors, including AI Grant (Nat Friedman, fmr GitHub CEO & Daniel Gross, cofounder at Safe Superintelligence), Y Combinator, the founders of Brex, Plaid, Helioscope, and others.
As an early member of the team, you’ll work closely with everyone to shape the engineering and company culture, with significant opportunity to grow as we scale.
We use TypeScript, NextJS, NodeJS, Postgres, and the major inference providers.
What You’ll Do 💪
- Work directly with the founders, customers, and users to rapidly prototype, test, and ship features
- Design and ship AI-driven features like agentic web browsing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and large-scale data extraction.
- Extend our core APIs, AI infrastructure, and data pipelines to enable highly requested application features.
- Own features end-to-end: from idea → design → implementation → production → user feedback
Qualifications 🧠
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Experience building full-stack software applications: You’ve built some web frontend (we use Typescript, React, and NextJS), as well as backing APIs and a data model layer (we use NestJS and Postgres). Exact technology match is great but not required, and even if your experience is stronger in frontend or backend, you’re excited to learn and contribute across the board
- Willingness to learn new domains: usage of AI tools, techniques, and APIs; how solar and storage project development work
- Bonus: Experience designing and building large, data-intensive systems
- Bonus: Experience using LLMs programmatically, building AI agents, and/or using RAG
- Bonus: Have worked at a startup or in energy
You’re a great fit if… ✅
- You love writing code, but also care about having a big impact. You’re excited to talk to customers, not just hide in code. You’re excited about shaping what to build.
- You know when to hack and when to refactor. Being an early engineer means making best judgment tradeoffs between building a really well-designed system and “good enough” for the situation.
- You want to operate like an owner and see how startups are built from the ground up. If there’s anything about business or tech you’re interested in, there will be opportunities to learn and do it.
- You’re curious about how clean energy and infrastructure get built, even if you’re new to the space.
You’re NOT a great fit if… ❌
- You want to ship perfect code. Speed as a startup is one of our main advantages. We don’t have the luxury to spend time on perfection and always try to do more with less.
- You don’t want involvement in the business side of things. Our technical decisions and business strategy go hand in hand - understanding how they influence each other helps us build the right things.
Compensation and Benefits 💰
- $150–200k
- Meaningful equity
- Health coverage and other startup perks
- Visa sponsorship for qualified candidates
- Sunny office in SOMA by Montgomery BART station
Our Company Values 💛
1. Act with Urgency: Move with decisiveness and momentum—do the right things now.
2. Extreme Ownership: We take responsibility, fix problems, and own outcomes.
3. Seek Truth: We practice intellectual rigor, challenge assumptions, and engage in honest debate and feedback, with respect for all voices.
4. Lead with Energy: We approach work with curiosity, execute with intensity, and build warm, trusting relationships with teammates and customers.
5. Build for the Mission: Spark is building the AI workflow engine that scales energy infrastructure to unlock an abundant and sustainable future
