---
title: 'Staff/Senior Staff Software Engineer at Heron Power'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-senior-staff-software-engineer-heron-power-scotts-valley-4d012nxctkkg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Staff/Senior Staff Software Engineer at Heron Power

- **Company:** Heron Power
- **Location:** Scotts Valley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/heron-power/a2d349cf-57e7-4d64-a3ac-745c12663430

## Job description

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 focus goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron Power'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 Staff/Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will be one of the most senior individual contributors on the Software team, setting technical direction for the systems that run Heron Power from the full scale Build platform that powers our factory floor and supply chain to the internal tools, services, and data infrastructure our engineers and operators depend on every day. You will architect and build software end-to-end: backend services, data pipelines, developer tooling, and the cloud and deployment infrastructure underneath them. This is a hands-on, high-leverage role. You will write production code, design systems that scale from early production into volume manufacturing and raise the engineering bar across the team through architecture, code review, mentorship, and the standards you set. You are expected to own ambiguous, cross-cutting problems and drive them to shipped, reliable software with minimal direction. You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with hardware, manufacturing, supply chain, and operations teams, translating messy real-world requirements into systems that perform. As a Staff+ IC, your impact comes through technical judgment and influence choosing the right problems, making the right build-versus-buy calls, and multiplying the output of everyone around you.

## How You Will Contribute

- Architecture & Systems Design: Set the technical direction for major systems across the platform designing services, data models, and APIs that are reliable, observable, and built to scale with the business.
- Hands-On Software Development: Write and ship production code across the stack, from backend services and data pipelines to internal tools, setting the standard for quality the rest of the team builds to.
- Cloud & Infrastructure: Own how we provision and run infrastructure on AWS, defining infrastructure as code with Terraform or Pulumi and making the platform reproducible, secure, and cost-aware.
- CI/CD & Developer Experience: Build and harden the pipelines and tooling that move code from development to production with tools like GitHub Actions so the whole team ships quickly and safely.
- Kubernetes & Deployment: Design how our applications are containerized, orchestrated, and run in production on Kubernetes, with sensible defaults the team can rely on.
- Observability & Reliability: Define how we monitor, alert on, and debug our systems with tools like Grafana and Prometheus and own the practices that keep production healthy.
- Security & Data Integrity: Embed sound security practices access controls, secrets management, and least privilege and ensure the data flowing through our systems is accurate and trustworthy.
- Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Raise the bar through code review, design reviews, and mentorship; help define engineering standards; and grow the engineers around you.

## What You Will Bring

We prioritize a strong grip on first principles, deep technical range, and the judgment to know what to build, what to buy, and what to leave alone.

Must-Have Requirements

- Master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field; equivalent demonstrated experience will be considered.
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time at a Staff or Principal IC level owning the design of large production systems.
- Deep expertise building and operating backend services and distributed systems in production, with strong fundamentals in data modeling, APIs, and system design.
- Strong proficiency in one or more modern languages (e.g., Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript) and comfort moving across the stack.
- Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), containers, and Kubernetes.
- Experience designing and owning CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling that let teams ship reliably (e.g., GitHub Actions).
- Solid grasp of observability, security, and operational best practices, monitoring, alerting, access controls, and secrets management.
- Strong written and verbal communication; able to drive technical decisions and align engineers and stakeholders without relying on authority.
- A track record of leading ambiguous, cross-functional projects end-to-end and mentoring other engineers.

Nice-to-Haves

- Experience building software for manufacturing, supply chain, hardware, or other physical-world operations (MES, WMS, ERP, factory or industrial systems).
- Experience standing up platforms or internal tooling from greenfield at a fast-growing startup.
- Familiarity with relational databases and SQL, and with designing data pipelines and warehousing.
- Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, or real-time / telemetry data.
- Expert-level comfort with Linux, Git workflows, and command-line tooling.
- Prior experience integrating third-party SaaS systems and making build-versus-buy decisions.

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 $180,000 to $240,000 from per year.

## About Heron Power

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Heron Power develops next-generation medium-voltage power electronics, including solid-state transformers, to modernize the electrical grid for AI data centers, renewable energy, and surging electricity demand.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Scotts Valley, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Drew Baglino

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Electric Power Transmission, Control, and Distribution; Industrial Power Electronics; Energy Infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B — hyperscale data center operators, solar and storage developers, utility-scale energy project developers, and the broader electricity sector.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build power electronics purpose-built for the 21st-century grid, helping the electricity sector grow faster and more affordably with scalable, reliable, and software-integrated infrastructure.

## Products & Services
- **Heron Link for Data Centers**: An integrated solid-state transformer + SuperBBU (battery backup unit) solution purpose-built for AI and hyperscale power needs, enabling more efficient, scalable, and reliable power delivery.
- **Heron Link for Solar & Storage**: An integrated solid-state transformer and inverter in one infinitely scalable platform, designed to streamline the connection of renewable generation and battery storage to the grid.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$178 million** across two rounds (Series A: $38M led by Capricorn Investment Group in June 2025; Series B: $140M led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz in February 2026).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
    - **Investors**: Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (American Dynamism Fund), Capricorn Investment Group, Gigascale Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Powerhouse.
    - **Advisors**: JB Straubel (Tesla Co-Founder), Zach Kirkhorn (Former Tesla CFO).
    - **Strategic Partner**: LG Energy Solution Vertech (collaboration to integrate Heron Link with U.S.-manufactured battery energy storage systems).
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Headcount has grown **975% year-over-year** to 72 employees, with 58 active job postings.
    - Awarded **$26.375 million** in tax credit incentives from the state of California to build a 40-gigawatt manufacturing facility and create 600+ advanced manufacturing jobs.
    - Rapidly scaling from engineering prototypes to early customer deployments with major industry partners.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep technical moat**: Heron’s core technology is an integrated solid-state transformer (SST) — a fundamental re-architecture of medium-voltage power electronics that is more scalable, software-integrated, and efficient than traditional copper-and-iron transformers.
- **Founder pedigree**: CEO Drew Baglino was a 18-year veteran and SVP of Powertrain and Energy at Tesla, where he led development of the 4680 battery cell, Megapack, and built multi-billion-dollar energy and charging businesses.
- **Strategic backing**: Backed by a world-class syndicate of climate-tech and deep-tech investors (Breakthrough Energy, a16z, Valor) and advised by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel and former Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn.
- **Manufacturing-first approach**: Already planning a 40 GW U.S. manufacturing facility with state incentives secured, signaling a focus on high-volume, cost-competitive production from the start.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale manufacturing**: Building out a large-scale U.S. factory to meet demand from AI data centers and renewable energy projects.
- **Commercial deployment**: Moving from engineering prototypes to delivering integrated solutions with strategic partners like LG Energy Solution Vertech.
- **Debottleneck the grid**: Targeting the critical infrastructure bottleneck where traditional transformers and grid equipment cannot keep pace with surging electricity demand from AI, electrification, and renewables.

## Why Work Here
- **High-impact mission**: Work on foundational hardware that directly enables the energy transition and AI infrastructure — systems that will be deployed and operated for decades.
- **Engineering culture**: Values rapid iteration ("build, test, learn"), first-principles reasoning, and cross-functional collaboration across hardware, software, manufacturing, and operations.
- **Ownership and autonomy**: Strong emphasis on taking accountability for outcomes, not just tasks, and working across team boundaries to deliver an impeccable product.
- **Transparent and direct**: Culture prizes clear communication, honest feedback, and progress over posturing — "no defensiveness, no ego."
- **Location and flexibility**: Based in Scotts Valley, California (near Santa Cruz/Silicon Valley), with a presence in Canada. The work is highly hands-on (hardware, lab, factory), so on-site presence is expected for engineering roles.
- **Growth trajectory**: Explosive headcount growth (975% YoY) and 58 open roles across electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, software, and supply chain disciplines — offering significant career acceleration for early hires.
- **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work alongside a team with deep expertise from Tesla, Meta, and KKR, with direct mentorship from a proven founder.

## Sources
1. [heronpower.com](https://heronpower.com/)
2. [heronpower.com/about](https://heronpower.com/about)
3. [heronpower.com/careers](https://heronpower.com/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/heron-power-electronics](https://www.linkedin.com/company/heron-power-electronics)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/heron-power](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/heron-power)

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