HydroDesk – Full Stack Software Engineer / Computer Scientist

Please note that this is a full time job and not an internship.

Why Would I Do This? Why Are You Doing This?

I like to think about what an energy miracle like that would mean in a slum I once visited in Nigeria. It was home to tens of thousands of people but there was no electricity. As night fell, no lights flickered on. The only glow came from open fires lit in metal barrels, where people gathered for the evening. There was no other light for kids to study by, no easy way to run a business or power local clinics and hospitals. It was sad to think about all of the potential in this community that was going untapped. A cheap, clean source of energy would change everything. Read More

Bill Gates, 2016 Annual Letter

Elon’s already doing solar and transport: solve problems nobody else is looking at, let's make Elon proud! If Elon's not enough for you, make Bill Gates proud too.

We need your help to change the world at its source, the conversion of energy, at scale and in a pragmatically disruptive manner.

You will be at the crossroads of “cool” things such as big data, GIS, cleantech, computer vision while making a meaningful dent in the “offline” reality of our desperate need for electricity and the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change.

We can only call it “super multidisciplinary” - there’s computer science+math, software engineering, UI/UX, data science and statistics, hydrology, geodesy, geology, hydraulic, civil, electrical and mechanical engineering plus all the business development, market development and so on. Hydropower is traditionally hard but we can make it easier with HydroDesk.

We are still in a garage like moment and we would love to share super early employee equity (aka a lot) and share the chance to build a great organization together with you.

There's Three of Us

1 engineer/investment manager in hydropower who managed US$500 million worth of renewable projects around South East Asia. He does the business development as well as the conversion of physical engineering to machine representation.

1 computer scientist who previously founded and ran a computer vision startup for 2 years and then was a lead engineer at another for 4 years - a specialist in graphs and computer vision (image recognition). He works on the algorithmic C++ “all the way at the back”-end.

1 full stack software engineer who spent the past 2 years developing an app scaled to >1 million users across SEA. He takes care of our web stack in python and angular.

I Have Never Seen a Dam/Hydropower Plant Before! What Does the Market Look Like?

Solar currently supplies about 1% of global electricity generation. Hydro supplies 17%! Batteries are cool? Hydropower currently serves 97% of global energy storage through a method called pumped storage. In 2015, we saw about 66GW (equivalent) of hydropower installed and 59GW of solar installed.

Specific Technical Topics to Solve

Earth Chess (more computer science): raster pathfinding, computer vision of satellite imagery, data harmonization and statistics, dynamic optimization in >20 dimensions of recursive components.

Web Stack (more software development): efficient delivery of geo databases (maps, meteo data, sub-surface properties etc.), terabyte scale image data pipelining and processing, designing appropriate front-end for users who are industrial engineers, visual communications and documentation such as reports, 3D renderings etc.

General Job Requirements and Description

A basic degree in computer science.

Above all else, you must be able to demonstrate curiosity, a track record of learning fast, a desire to know something inside-out, OCD on details, values perfection over deadlines and you want to make a difference.

If you are a fresh graduate, you should have completed internships, hackathons, research and coding projects.

We have two roles - one more focused on Computer Science and another on Software Engineering.

Computer Science: An interest and pursuit in algorithms. C/C++/Python with general experience in libraries such as Boost/numpy, being able write and compile with CMake/gcc/CLANG, implementing theses and papers into working code, debugging in badly documented and obscure environments. OpenCV experience a plus but not necessary. Some experience in computer vision, path-finding, machine learning, optimization or large data processing will be pluses.

Software Engineering: experience in AngularJS or any other MVVM which consumes a web-backend API, knows how a ORM(ed) SQL db behaves and have set up db schemas before that balances efficiency and syntactic convenience, experience working in a team following best practice style guides, understands the importance of architecture, clean code, comments and tests (understands all these things primarily because you once screwed up big time before and spent days refactoring a mess that nobody can read), understands the relevance of team philosophies such as agile, bug tracking etc. Experience in Python/Flask and writing BASH scripts, administering servers will also be great pluses.

Engineering Stack

C++, Postgres, OpenCV, Python Angular + various GIS frameworks/technologies.

Civil-Mechanical-Electrical-Hydraulic Engineering.

Geotechnical engineering, hydrology,GIS/geodesy.

Vision and Values

Our current age of information must lead to an age of space, an age of longevity but we need to get our energy and climate change problems, our source of prosperity, out of the way.

Our immediate focus is to help project developers prospect and design 2,000GW (electrification for 2 billion households) of hydropower plants globally.

We embrace the cultures of a startup: learning, failing, iteration, execution and vision (i.e. urgent vs. important), free food, transparency, sharing, love for product, no evil, making a difference etc.

However we never forget that we are also a business: one where customers submit purchase orders, we keep our promises and they write us checks, we never miss payroll and there’s insurance for all our employees’ families and we pay our taxes.