Senior System Engineer

Company Introduction

ALWAYS PAMOJA : We are one global team with one mission - Energy Equality through Enterprise Technology

Our diverse team at ZOLA Electric dispersed across 4 continents and 13 different nationalities, share a common vision and commitment to solving the Energy Access challenge that afflicts almost 3 billion people and businesses globally. This is one of the world's great problems, impacting our most vulnerable and driving inequality across income, healthcare, education and climate change. As one of us, you are equally passionate about making an impact as you are creating and promoting the technologies that drive Energy Equality across the globe.

ZOLA Electric was born in and around the Serengeti in Tanzania, initially installing smart, connected devices (batteries and solar) that powered basic energy needs such as lighting for rural communities. Our theory that thousands of networked, connected devices will form the basic architecture of energy provision in emerging markets holds today. ZOLA doesn’t design discrete hardware products sold to end users, we design an enterprise technology platform that combines the power of a family of hardware devices all controlled and managed by one operating system, ZOLA iNTELLIGENCE. Our customers are regional and global integrators who are building and managing distributed grids and delivering community level electrification (homes, businesses, healthcare, schools, etc.) across the 80 Energy Access countries of the world. We design, implement, and help them manage and support these grids with our comprehensive platform consisting of hardware, software, and services. In short, our PURPOSE is to enable our customers to launch, scale, drive efficiency, sustainability and ultimately electrify their countries. Today we are proud to say that our technology platform delivers reliable, affordable, and smart power in over 10 countries, and four continents, to almost 3 million people, schools, clinics, and businesses. This is just the beginning.

Zola provides distributed energy solutions to enable community-level electrification.

To support its mission, Zola is looking for a hands-on Senior Systems Engineer to participate in the development of its next generation systems and support the existing product portfolio. The ideal candidate will have experience in designing electrical systems, in building prototypes, participating in EVT and DVT designs testing along the development. They will help the transition of the designs to high volume manufacturers in Asia. The candidate will work closely with cross-functional teams to review the electrical designs. The ideal candidate is passionate about renewable energy including solar generation, battery storage and power conversion.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Participate in design and development of digital and analog electronics to control high-power electronics systems.
• Product level electrical design including component selection, circuit design, subsystem design and schematic capture and PCB layout in Altium.
• Prototypes bring-up and debugging, hardware bug tracking, functional verification, and signal characterization.
• Work with product management to convert product requirements into engineering specifications.
• Generate electrical design specifications for subsystems and oversee end-to-end product introduction activities.
• Develop and execute hardware and system test plans and perform tests for pre-compliance, environmental and reliability.
• Work directly with Contract Manufacturers in Asia and component suppliers to ensure quality deliverables.
• Collaborate with mechanical engineers to optimize system level electro-mechanical design including thermal management.
• Participate in DFMEAs, Design for Quality (DFQ) and Design for Reliability (DFR) and assist in defining process objectives.
• Develop numerical simulations and data analysis techniques to support the creation of control algorithms and decision-support software, making extensive use of field and laboratory experimental data.
• Develop numeric models and simulations of hierarchical control schemes for decentralized microgrids in time domain.
• Define aggregation methods for multiple distributed energy systems compatible with industry gateway standards (e.g., IEEE 2030).
• Develop peer-to-peer energy sharing and demand-response schemes.
• Prototype preventive maintenance decision-support software.
• Prototype methods for long-term battery health management and estimation.
• Develop methods to size energy systems under demand uncertainty.
• Develop fault diagnosis and failure prognosis algorithms.

Key Qualifications

Physical Requirements

Working Conditions

What We Offer