Senior Performance Engineer

SunStrong Management; United States; On-site; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

SunStrong Management seeks a Senior Performance Engineer to oversee energy performance across residential, commercial, community solar, and utility-scale assets. You will model production versus forecast, defend performance metrics, and coordinate with operations, O&M, and asset management on data quality, billing, and reporting.

You will help define data requirements, validate dashboards, and guide AI-enabled diagnostics while ensuring accurate settlement and investor reporting.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in engineering, physics, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years in solar or storage performance engineering, asset performance management, or renewable O&M engineering, including 3+ years supporting commercial or utility-scale assets.
• Hands-on experience with PV performance modeling in PlantPredict (PVsyst or SAM acceptable as a secondary), and with satellite irradiance and weather datasets including Solcast, SolarAnywhere, and Open-Meteo.
• Working experience with fleet monitoring and asset performance platforms including AlsoEnergy, Power Factors, and 3E, including data extraction, tag mapping, and alarm configuration.
• Proficiency in SQL and in Python for engineering analysis (pandas, numpy, pvlib or equivalent).
• Practical fluency with AI tooling — coding assistants, LLM-based analysis, and agentic workflows — applied to engineering work, with sound judgment on where output must be verified.
• Demonstrated ability to specify data requirements, validation rules, and reconciliation logic for engineering and BI teams, and to review dashboards and reporting for correctness.
• Working knowledge of monitoring, metering, and SCADA data acquisition, including common protocols and vendor APIs (Modbus, SunSpec, DNP3, REST).
• Familiarity with leased, PPA, and securitized portfolios, including production and availability guarantees, settlement mechanics, and investor reporting obligations.
• Battery energy storage experience covering BMS behavior, state-of-health analysis, and dispatch validation.
• Ability to work against incomplete legacy as-built and monitoring data, and to state assumptions and uncertainty explicitly to engineering, asset management, and capital partners.

Responsibilities

• Model and monitor energy performance across residential, C&I, community solar, and utility-scale assets in PlantPredict and fleet monitoring platforms (AlsoEnergy, Power Factors, 3E).
• Calculate and defend contractual performance metrics including availability, performance ratio, production guarantees, and liquidated damages exposure, and support billing and reporting.
• Evaluate billing and settlement accuracy with asset management and O&M teams, reconciling metered and invoiced quantities.
• Investigate underperformance to root cause across inverters, meters, communications, energy storage, and site conditions, driving corrective actions.
• Direct the data requirements for fleet performance — tags, granularity, units, timestamps, quality rules — and support data collection and reconciliation.
• Advise on development of Power BI dashboards and performance reporting, defining metric definitions and acceptance criteria.
• Define monitoring, revenue-grade metering, and telemetry requirements for new sites and validate commissioning data.
• Establish performance baselines and data mappings for newly acquired portfolios; migrate from legacy monitoring platforms.
• Validate storage system performance against contracted operating modes and dispatch behavior.
• Apply AI tooling and agentic workflows to accelerate diagnostics and analytics, ensuring engineering verification where needed.
• Serve as technical reviewer for warranty claims and mentor junior engineers on performance methods.

Skills

Solar performance modeling

SQL

Python (pandas, numpy)

Data validation

BI dashboards

AI tooling

Asset performance management

SCADA data acquisition

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in engineering, physics, or related technical field

Tools

PlantPredict

AlsoEnergy

3E

PVsyst

Solcast

SolarAnywhere

Open-Meteo

PowerBI

Modbus/SunSpec/API

Job description

Job Summary

The Senior Performance Engineer is responsible for expected-versus-actual energy performance across SunStrong’s serviced fleet, spanning residential systems, commercial and industrial sites, community solar, and utility-scale projects. This role models production, quantifies and defends contractual performance obligations, and drives underperformance to root cause with operations and field services. As the senior technical authority on fleet performance, the position sets the data requirements behind performance reporting, advises on dashboard and analytics development rather than building it, and partners with asset management and O&M on billing and settlement accuracy. The role sits on the Fleet Management Technology team and requires equal comfort with a residential inverter fleet, a metered utility-scale PPA settlement, and the data platform that carries both.

Job Summary

The Senior Performance Engineer is responsible for expected-versus-actual energy performance across SunStrong’s serviced fleet, spanning residential systems, commercial and industrial sites, community solar, and utility-scale projects. This role models production, quantifies and defends contractual performance obligations, and drives underperformance to root cause with operations and field services. As the senior technical authority on fleet performance, the position sets the data requirements behind performance reporting, advises on dashboard and analytics development rather than building it, and partners with asset management and O&M on billing and settlement accuracy. The role sits on the Fleet Management Technology team and requires equal comfort with a residential inverter fleet, a metered utility-scale PPA settlement, and the data platform that carries both.

Responsibilities

• Model and monitor energy performance across residential, C&I, community solar, and utility-scale assets in PlantPredict and the fleet monitoring platforms (AlsoEnergy, Power Factors, 3E), comparing metered production against simulation using weather and irradiance data from Solcast, SolarAnywhere, and Open-Meteo.
• Calculate and defend contractual performance metrics including availability, performance ratio, production guarantees, and liquidated damages exposure, and produce the recurring analysis that supports billing, PPA and lease invoicing, and investor and securitization reporting.
• Evaluate billing and settlement accuracy with the asset management and O&M teams, reconciling metered, monitored, and invoiced quantities and resolving discrepancies at the source.
• Investigate underperformance to root cause across inverters, meters, communications, energy storage, and site conditions, and drive corrective work to closure with O&M and field services.
• Direct the data requirements for fleet performance — tags, granularity, units, timestamps, and quality rules — and support data collection, ingestion, and reconciliation with the data platform team.
• Advise on the development of Power BI dashboards and performance reporting, defining metric definitions, calculation logic, and acceptance criteria, and validating output rather than building the reports directly.
• Define monitoring, revenue-grade metering, and telemetry requirements for new and retrofitted sites, and validate commissioning data before a site is accepted into the fleet.
• Establish performance baselines and data mappings for newly acquired or transitioned portfolios, including migration from legacy monitoring platforms.
• Validate storage system performance against contracted operating modes, including dispatch behavior, state of health, cycling, and demand-charge and tariff-driven response.
• Apply AI tooling and agentic workflows to accelerate fleet diagnostics, anomaly triage, and recurring analysis, and define where model output requires engineering verification before it is relied on.
• Serve as technical reviewer for warranty, insurance, and equipment claims requiring quantified production loss, and mentor junior engineers and analysts on performance methods.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in engineering, physics, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years in solar or storage performance engineering, asset performance management, or renewable O&M engineering, including 3+ years supporting commercial or utility-scale assets.
• Hands‑on experience with PV performance modeling in PlantPredict (PVsyst or SAM acceptable as a secondary), and with satellite irradiance and weather datasets including Solcast, SolarAnywhere, and Open-Meteo.
• Working experience with fleet monitoring and asset performance platforms including AlsoEnergy, Power Factors, and 3E, including data extraction, tag mapping, and alarm configuration.
• Proficiency in SQL and in Python for engineering analysis (pandas, numpy, pvlib or equivalent).
• Practical fluency with AI tooling — coding assistants, LLM‑based analysis, and agentic workflows — applied to engineering work, with sound judgment on where output must be verified.
• Demonstrated ability to specify data requirements, validation rules, and reconciliation logic for engineering and BI teams, and to review dashboards and reporting for correctness.
• Working knowledge of monitoring, metering, and SCADA data acquisition, including common protocols and vendor APIs (Modbus, SunSpec, DNP3, REST).
• Familiarity with leased, PPA, and securitized portfolios, including production and availability guarantees, settlement mechanics, and investor reporting obligations.
• Battery energy storage experience covering BMS behavior, state-of-health analysis, and dispatch validation.
• Ability to work against incomplete legacy as‑built and monitoring data, and to state assumptions and uncertainty explicitly to engineering, asset management, and capital partners.