Principal Software Engineer Jobs in Menlo Park, CA

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Mainspring Energy is revolutionizing power generation with the world’s most flexible and adaptable local power generation technology, the Mainspring Linear Generator. Commercial, industrial, and utility leaders are choosing Mainspring over traditional options like engines, turbines, and fuel cells to quickly and reliably deliver local power for EV charging, commercial facilities, data centers, and grid-scale operations.

The Mainspring Linear Generator is fuel flexible, ramps up and down to meet demand, and utilizes a flameless reaction with near-zero NOx emissions. Backed by top-tier investors including Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, American Electric Power, Lightrock, and General Catalyst, Mainspring designs, manufactures, and delivers its products to customers across the U.S. today, and we’re quickly scaling for international expansion.

Inspired by our vision of the affordable, reliable, net-zero carbon grid, Mainspring is rapidly expanding within the $816B global electricity equipment market, and we’re hiring the best talent to meet growing customer demand around the globe. We welcome a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and talents to bring fresh perspectives and ongoing innovation to our customers.

We are looking to build relationships with people who share our values:

Pragmatic Optimism. Building a new category of world-class power generation requires the optimism of ambition and creativity, balanced with practicality to solve problems efficiently. The challenges that arise are opportunities for growth.

Excellence without Ego. We bring expertise and commitment to creating the best customer experience, from sales to deployment and service, just as we apply deep technical rigor to building and delivering world-class products. We strive for excellence and behave as leaders with the humility to acknowledge our challenges, both collectively and as individual contributors.

Proactive Collaboration. The integration and cross-disciplinary nature of Mainspring’s business requires intentionally seeking out others who bring different skills, perspectives, and priorities. Our culture of inclusion and respect extends beyond our team to interactions with our partners and customers.

JOB OVERVIEW

Mainspring Energy is reinventing distributed power generation with our Linear Generator; a fuel-flexible, ultra-low emissions platform delivering resilient, on-site power for commercial, industrial, and utility customers. We have a high-impact opportunity for a Principal Cloud Platform Software Engineer to join our world-class engineering team as we scale our global fleet.

In this role, you will be the lead architect owning the cloud-to-field software ecosystem that powers, monitors, and optimizes our distributed energy assets. This is a rare opportunity to unify cloud, data, and embedded device software under one technical vision. You will lead the team architecting industrial-grade, uptime-critical systems where software decisions directly impact physical infrastructure and global energy transition.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team building high-speed systems to ingest and process real-time telemetry from thousands of remote assets
• Design and build the infrastructure for secure remote monitoring, diagnostics, and large-scale software updates (OTA) on embedded devices
• Architect distributed data systems (e.g., Snowflake, Spark) to generate actionable insights and autonomous fleet optimizations
• Drive a reliability-first culture, implementing systems and processes that ensure 99.99%+ uptime for critical power infrastructure
• Embed AI into engineering workflows and product architecture to drive measurable gains in developer productivity and system reliability
• Collaborate with embedded systems, hardware design, and operations teams to ensure software-to-hardware synergy and long-term fleet health

QUALIFICATIONS

• 15+ years in software engineering, with a proven track record of architectural leadership across multiple teams in high-stakes production environments
• Deep experience in Industrial IoT (IIoT), energy systems, industrial automation, or managing fleet-scale device platforms
• Deep experience architecting within AWS, GCP, or Azure environments, specifically for distributed systems and large-scale data platforms
• A "physics-first" systems thinker who understands the interplay between cloud software and high-availability hardware
• Expertise in distributed systems and data infrastructure (e.g., Spark, Snowflake, or equivalent high-throughput telemetry pipelines)
• Demonstrated success in leveraging AI/ML to drive developer productivity, predictive maintenance, and autonomous fleet management
• A fundamental commitment to uptime; you believe 99% isn't good enough for critical energy infrastructure
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical visions to both internal engineering teams and executive stakeholders

This position is onsite at our Menlo Park HQ. The salary will be adjusted to reflect local market conditions based on employee location as well as the experience of the employee. Along with the base salary, Mainspring offers pre-IPO stock options + benefits.

Does your experience not meet all of our posted requirements? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to positions unless they meet every listed requirement. At Mainspring, we are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, flexible, and collaborative environment, so if you want to help us transition the world to clean and affordable electricity, and don’t meet all posted requirements for a particular role, we’d still love to hear from you. Mainspring can sometimes be flexible enough to shift responsibilities for the right person, or otherwise identify open or upcoming roles that may better fit your professional background.

In more traditional words, Mainspring Energy, Inc is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

This compensation and benefits information is based on Mainspring Energy's estimate as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. We generally do not negotiate on salary once we have made an offer. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors that may include location, relevant prior experience and/or education, or particular skills and expertise. New hires joining the company tend to be paid within the starting base pay range noted above, with opportunities to increase pay over time based on development of additional skills, competencies, and company-specific knowledge.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.