About EnergySage and what they do
EnergySage our flagship product is our online marketplace for rooftop solar. The concept is homeowners, small business owners come to our site. Sure a few details about their property, including their electric bills. We share those details with our nationwide network of local solar installers who prepare custom quotes for that property for that electric bill, submit those quotes online through our platform and run a standard analysis on it. So we can provide a true apples to apples comparison of those different offers what solar might look like on your property. Every time every, almost everybody is in our platform, as a first time buyer for solar, there are them people going through this process a second time. So education is really key. We support that through online help a lot of long form content, live customer support, or energy advisor team that helps people understand their options, help them prepare quotes. And, yeah, we're looking to bring that same approach to other kinds of energy technologies, we've expanded to a community solar marketplace. So if you don't own your roof, if you have bad credit, if you got bad shading or whatnot, instead of getting so accustomed installed solar panel system on your property, you can take part in a community solar farm in your area. So you're getting solar electricity, it's just not matter in your property, we've actually expanded to battery storage, we're starting to serve commercial, commercial and industrial customers as well. And we're looking to get into other clean energy products and services through an online marketplace platform.
Details on EnergySage's engineering team
So the engineering team at EnergySage is about 20 engineers, mix of finance specialists, back end specialists and a whole lot of full stack tooling. So it's a web platform. So web technologies are certainly the key part there. We've also got a growing cloud engineering team and a business intelligence kind of data engineering team. The team is split out into pods. The idea there is that there's a group of engineers with a product manager and help from the design team focused on a particular end user segment. So for example, we got a pod focused on the rooftop solar consumer segment, we got another pod focused on the rooftop solar installer segment, another one focused on our community solar marketplace. The idea there is that each pod has all of the skills and techniques and capacity, they need to define design, prioritize, implement, test, and ship a new bit of work to improve the experience for that end user segment. So try to you know, get the decision making kind of last mile as focused as it can be. And certainly within the pods. Like it's really with an engineering manager sage, we're committed to learning and growing, we know that being an engineer means always learning new things, if you if you're not learning, you're gonna eventually be outdated. So we committed to learning on the team in a few different ways. Certainly, code reviews are really an important part of our process, making sure that all code gets at least another pair of eyes on it looking for opportunities for different ways of doing things, different techniques you can learn. Also, there's always a pod Tech Lead that's kind of shepherding the team through recognizing where people can kind of level up skills, match them with new projects to help exercise those new skills. Also, as a company we're not shy from from jumping into pair programming sessions, especially for learning new parts of the code base, different techniques that can be really powerful. We're not programming first, but we certainly see the value to it, especially for education. Then we've also got other supports like a engineering book club, and also Lunch and Learn sessions, we look at Tech Talks, for example, and then have a discussion about what that how that relates to our work. It introduces what we agree with what we disagree with, how we can apply it to our day-to-day work. So we're a close knit team. Really like the work we're doing. Yeah, lots of opportunity for growth.
Cool projects engineers get to work on
Certainly at a high level, a lot of the work we do is focused on leveraging data and automation to solve a couple of problems, certainly to streamline processes on both sides of marketplace for that we're serving both buyers and sellers of solar panel and other clean energy systems. So whatever we can do to automate their steps and reduce the manual effort, that's all for the good. The other thing is broadly educating buyers and sellers to different tools, calculators, comparison data analytics tools, within but it gets one very specific project that I wanted to highlight that we've got coming up this year. We're tackling automated preliminary rooftop system design. So based just on an address, we can use technology to determine where the panels would go, what roof surfaces are appropriate for panels, what the shading might look like. You know how best to do the kind of jigsaw puzzle of where to fit the panels on the roof, estimate the electricity production of those panels and then determine the economics, you know, based on costs for different packages different installers might offer. So really, trying to fully automate Make the quick preparation to get preliminary quotes for homeowners to get that as quickly as they can get that insight right away without having to actually wait for an installer to manually prepare a quote for you. So super excited about the system design automation project coming up.
Details on the tech stack
So on the backend, we're primarily a Python shop using the Django web framework. On the front end, we are embracing the view dot J. S reactive web application framework. We really love the single file components aspect of view, J S, it's really flexible and well thought out framework infrastructure on AWS, using containers and infrastructures code. And then we've recently switched over to using GitHub actions for continuous integration and deployment. So cloud first thought always, Python Vue js, but happy to you know, especially folks that already know, other languages, other web development frameworks, happy to train you on the job. We know that, you know, syntax and syntax and a lot of the you know, the harder part is the knowledge that goes into, you know, figuring out what the broad technical approach is not the specific syntax of Python or few.
What to expect during the interview process
So we do our best and through the interview process to infer kind of a day in the life of a typical engineer. We avoid whiteboarding exercises, that kind of thing. Our technical assessments are always open book, so you can Google stuff you can check StackOverflow, you know, we use those tools too. Sometimes, we do our best to make it live and interactive. So you can sort of ask us questions, you know, we can give suit give gentle nudges, because again, that's how we roll as a team, we support each other, we, you know, want to set people up for success and want to have assessments that align with what it would be like as a regular engineer. When possible, if you come to us with a project, you've written yourself, you have code yourself, we'll use that instead of a canned assignment. Certainly, we want, you know, if you can use your own code, your own tools, it's going to be a lot more organic to really help us get a sense for what you'd be like in the chair. And I guess the other thing I want to point out, certainly will always ensure that anytime you're interacting with engineers on the EnergySage team through the hiring process, we obviously have a good percentage of the time for you to ask us questions. Certainly, you know, it's sort of a two way thing we want to make sure there's there's a good fit both directions, want to make sure you have the information, you need to feel confident in your decision to move forward with EnergySage.
Why now is the ideal time to join
Yeah, now it's definitely great time to join EnergySage, the solar industry is moving kind of at a macro level. We are an established name within the solar industry. Since 2018, through all our transparent, unbiased content covering a huge breadth of material. We've been the number one solar website in the US, you're welcome to try it Google anything about solar, you'll find us. And I'm proud to announce that we're now part of the Schneider Electric family. They're a global name and electricity committed deeply to decarbonisation, and they see us as a clear path forward and really are committed to our transparency and telling it like it is in the solar industry, that has helped get us to where we are today. There's there's funding to fuel our growth and they also open the door to international expansion. Currently, we're us only but next couple of years, I expect we are going to start reaching out to other countries. Also. You know, I've been I've been with EnergySage since the beginning when it was just the CEO and me in a co working space. We're now at a point where we're big enough to be past the chaos and uncertainty of early stage startup. But we're still small enough where you know everybody and you can contribute on many levels. So it's really, really great time to join
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
