About the job Senior Product Engineer
About Us
SolarAPP is cutting the costs of the clean energy transition, making it so that everyone can afford to power their lives with clean energy. Our automated plan review and permitting software reduces soft costs by turning a weeks-long bureaucratic process into instant approval. We're already deployed in over 500 cities across 17 states, with more than 120,000 permits issued, representing over 800,000 kW of clean energy. Were growing fast to expand our impact, developing capabilities to conduct virtual inspections once permitted projects are complete. This will allow us to serve governments and contractors with an end-to-end solution for streamlining residential projects. Join a team building tools that enable safe, automated, and instantaneous permitting and inspections for solar, storage, EV charging, and other clean energy technologies.
About the Role
We are hiring three Senior Product Engineers who will expand our engineering team at SolarAPP Foundation. In this role, you will work closely with the CTO, Product Team, Customer Support team, and a diverse community of solar installers, municipalities, and clean energy experts to build software that fundamentally improves how clean energy systems are permitted and installed in the U.S.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You will work across the entire technology stack, designing APIs, building user-facing interfaces, and scaling cloud infrastructure. Youll help define not just how we build our product, but what we build, applying strong product engineering principles in a mission-driven environment.
This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who wants to apply their skills toward meaningful social impact while helping shape the foundation of a growing organization.
Reports to: Engineering Team Lead
What You'll Do
We are a small team of highly skilled generalists who each bring significant ownership of key areas of our technology stack. Currently, our technical team of 5 supports our platform performing about 10% of US solar permits. Youll be building the infrastructure to deploy more clean energy projects, faster, and deliver value to all of our customers. Youll be helping to build new features, scale our core technologies, and bring in the latest generation of AI technologies to our platform. You dont need to be an expert in everything we do, but should be comfortable working across the stack and interested in learning more every day. You will:
- Craft high-quality software, leveraging your expertise: We expect that everyone on the team has their area of expertise but is also comfortable with working across the stack (Laravel app with some Vue on AWS, backed by Postgres); you should deeply understand how each piece of a large software project works, and how it all fits together. Youll work closely with your teammates and Product Manager to determine what were building, how were building it and how well roll it out and support it.
- Debug Production Issues: Everyone takes a regular turn supporting our users directly in our dev-triage role - although we dont page outside of business hours. Youll be relied upon by your teammates to swarm on critical issues and debug them when they come up.
- Serve as a leader on our small but mighty team: Youll provide feedback to colleagues via technical design reviews and code reviews, feedback to your Product Manager on their PRDs, and help us frame the tradeoffs between various implementations that allow us to best meet our goals. Youll own large, end-to-end projects with a direct business impact. As a small team that does a lot, youll be comfortable with navigating ambiguity and identifying blockers.
What You Bring
Essential Skills and Background
- 5+ years of experience building and supporting production SaaS applications
- Experience working across the full technology stack, from front-end UI to cloud infrastructure
- Experience with an MVC framework such as Laravel (used at SolarAPP), Ruby on Rails, Django, or similar
- Experience building on AWS (used at SolarApp) or other cloud platforms for deploying and managing applications; you know how to debug these when things go wrong and have opinions on how to architect for long term maintainability and scalability.
- Proven ability to design, build, and document production-grade APIs (including versioning and integrations)
- Experience supporting live systems, debugging issues, and performing root cause analysis
- Comfort collaborating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders to shape product decisions
- Strong sense of ownership and ability to lead engineering efforts on a small team
- Experience using the newest AI development tooling such as Cursor or Claude Code to accelerate your efforts in a safe, reliable way
Additional Preferred Skills and Background
- Experience working in government technology or clean energy domains
- Background or familiarity with electrical engineering concepts, or solar / energy storage systems
- Experience on small engineering teams (fewer than 6 engineers) supporting production software
- Experience building modern front-end interfaces using frameworks like Vue or React
- Experience collaborating with partners to design and build rich integrations
- Familiarity with software automation & documentation
- Experience with data modeling or database design
Compensation and Benefits
This is a full-time role with a competitive salary ranging from $140,000 – $190,000, commensurate with experience.
We offer a competitive benefits package, including:
Medical, dental, vision
401K with 5% employer match
Employer-paid short and long-term disability, and life insurance
Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
Parental leave
$75 monthly internet stipend
- $500 work-from-home stipend for each new hire
Hiring Process Outline (targets)
- Application period: this role will remain open until filled, though we are prioritizing applications submitted by 2/20/26
- Review applications and respond to candidates: rolling basis, starting in mid February
- Recruiter phone screen: starting in late February
- Take-home exercise: to be completed within 3 days
- Virtual TQ/technical panel interview 1: starting in early March
- Virtual EQ/behavioral panel interview 2: starting in mid to late March
- Reference checks and final conversations: starting in late March or early April
- Selection and offer: Mid April
- Ideal start date period: Late April to early May
Equal Opportunity Employer
SolarAPP Foundation is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and strongly encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.