Renewable Energy OPT Jobs in Illinois

The Company

The energy industry is entering one of the most significant periods of growth and transformation in its history. Meeting the nation's growing demand for reliable electricity will require new ideas, new infrastructure, and talented people committed to building for the future.

At Cypress Creek Energy, we're meeting that challenge by developing and operating the energy infrastructure needed to power communities, support economic opportunity, and strengthen resilience. We believe our responsibility extends beyond the grid and that how we build matters just as much as what we build.

That same commitment extends to our employees. We invest in professional growth, encourage collaboration across teams, and provide opportunities to take ownership, expand your expertise, and advance your career. Our culture is grounded in safety, accountability, respect, and a shared commitment to deliver results. Join us and help meet one of the most important energy challenges of our time while building a rewarding career.

Overview

The Software Engineer is responsible for building and maintaining the backend services and APIs that Cypress Creek Energy's business runs on, and for applying machine learning and data science techniques to the forecasting and analytical challenges the business depends on. The role spans the full lifecycle: gathering requirements from business stakeholders, designing and implementing backend services and models, shipping them through the deployment pipeline, and supporting them in production.

This role pairs deep backend software engineering with applied machine learning. The majority of the work is designing, building, and maintaining well-tested APIs and services; that work is complemented by developing and deploying ML models that improve forecasting and data-driven decision-making across the business. Engineers build technical depth in the systems and models they own while expanding their domain knowledge of the renewable energy business those systems serve.

Responsibilities

Software Design & Development

• Design, build, test, and maintain backend services, APIs, and internal applications.
• Write clear, well-tested, maintainable code and participate actively in code review.
• Translate business requirements into technical designs.
• Contribute to the team's engineering standards, shared libraries, and services.
• Experience with event-driven or stream-processing architectures (Kafka or similar).

Production Ownership

• Deploy and operate services in production including monitoring and triage of failures.
• Diagnose issues across service boundaries (application code, data stores, message streams, and third-party dependencies) and resolve root causes.
• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment configuration for the services you work on.

Data, ML & Integrations

• Apply machine learning and statistical modeling techniques to forecasting models and other data science initiatives across the business.
• Build and maintain integrations between internal applications and enterprise systems.
• Perform exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, and model validation using scientific Python tooling (numpy, pandas, and related libraries).
• Design and evolve data models in the company's analytical data platform and write efficient queries against large datasets.
• Build and maintain data pipelines and services that ingest, transform, and serve data from internal and third-party sources.
• Move ML models from prototype to production: package, deploy, monitor, and retrain models as part of the services you own.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner directly with business users (development, engineering, finance, and operations) to understand their workflows and turn ambiguous needs into working software.
• Support internal users of the applications you own, including troubleshooting unexpected results and explaining technical behavior to non-technical audiences.
• Produce and maintain documentation that lets business users work independently and allows other engineers to pick up your work.

Continuous Improvement

• Identify and address technical debt, manual processes, and operational pain points in the systems you work on.
• Evaluate new tools, libraries, and approaches, and make the case for adoption where they meaningfully improve the team's output.
• Contribute to a culture of clear documentation, code quality, and engineering discipline across the team.

Education & Experience Required

• 3-6 years of professional software engineering experience with backend development in Python.
• Experience designing, building, and consuming APIs.
• Experience applying machine learning or statistical modeling techniques (for example, forecasting, predictive modeling, or other data science methods).
• Experience with scientific or numerical Python (numpy, pandas, and related tooling).
• Experience with databases, including schema design, migrations, and query performance.
• Background in renewable energy development and/or operations - solar development, energy modeling, performance engineering, or asset management.
• Demonstrated ownership of software in production, including debugging and resolving live issues.
• Strong written communication skills; able to document technical work and explain it clearly to non-technical audiences.
• Judgment to distinguish problems that warrant a robust engineered solution from those that need a fast, correct answer today.
• Ability to manage ambiguity and drive work to completion with limited direction.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Working knowledge of containers and CI/CD.
• Experience integrating with Salesforce or a comparable enterprise system of record.
• Familiarity with energy modeling.
• Experience with ML frameworks and libraries (for example, scikit-learn, PyTorch, or TensorFlow) or time-series forecasting methods.
• Embrace and live by the mission and values of Cypress Creek Energy.

Location: The location for this role is one of our office locations: Durham, NC; or Washington, DC. Our team operates on a hybrid schedule, with in-office schedule of three days per week.

Compensation: The salary range for the position is $120,000 - $150,000. This position is also eligible for an annual bonus. Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate's qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location.

Benefits:

• 15 days of Paid Time Off, accrual up to 20 days, 11 observed holidays.
• 401(k) Match
• Comprehensive package including medical, dental, vision and health insurance
• Wellness stipend, family planning stipend, and generous parental leave
• Tuition Reimbursement
• Phone Bill Reimbursement
• Company Swag

A note to Recruiting Agencies: Cypress Creek Energy Human Resources team does not accept unsolicited resumes from third party recruiters, staffing firms, or related agencies. The Human Resources team coordinates all recruiting and hiring at our company. We do not accept resumes from third-party recruiters unless authorized by the Human Resources team and if a signed agreement is in place. Any unsolicited resumes will be considered property of CCE and we are not responsible for any related fees. All communication related to recruiting partnerships should ONLY be directed to the Human Resources team.

Cypress Creek Energy is an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status. We are committed to providing a workplace that is inclusive and values diversity, and we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

Please be aware of recruiting scams—official communications will only come from @ccrenew.com, we will never request personal or financial information, and any suspicious activity should be reported to HR@ccrenew.com.