About us

Pila Energy is a seed-stage startup building plug-and-play home battery systems that make reliable power accessible without complex installation or costly electrical upgrades. Our mission is to amplify self-sufficiency, safety, and comfort in homes by starting with the most essential element: reliable power.

We’re modernizing the grid from the bottom up by distributing intelligence and energy storage across homes and small businesses — starting with the devices people already rely on every day.

We design elegant, intuitive hardware and software that bring energy resilience and management to renters and homeowners alike. Our small, high-impact team brings deep experience building leading energy and IoT products at companies including SPAN, Tesla, Apple, Lightship, and Amazon Alexa.

The Role

We’re looking for a generalist software engineer who wants to work on real systems, ship fast, and own meaningful pieces of a product end-to-end.

At Pila, software spans everything from embedded firmware running on batteries in people’s homes, to edge services, cloud infrastructure, internal tools, and user-facing experiences. You don’t need to be an expert in all of it but you should be excited to touch a lot of it.

You’ll work closely with hardware, product, and design to build software that controls physical energy systems, connects reliably to the cloud, and feels intuitive to use. This is a hands-on role with real ownership and real consequences; your code will run on devices powering people’s homes.

Our core team is primarily based in San Francisco, and we value tight collaboration, pragmatism, and momentum.

What We're Looking For

• Strong generalist software instincts — you enjoy learning new systems and figuring things out.

• Experience shipping production software, ideally on systems that interact with the real world (devices, infrastructure, networks).

• Comfort working close to hardware or strong curiosity to learn.

• Ability to move between abstraction levels: low-level debugging one day, high-level system design the next.

• Pragmatic mindset: you care about correctness, reliability, and safety, but you know when to ship and iterate.

• Clear communication and a collaborative working style.

• A bias toward ownership; you like being responsible for outcomes, not just tickets.

Experience level: roughly 3–7 years, but we care far more about what you’ve built than the number.

Areas You Might Contribute To

Depending on your background and interests, you may work on some combination of:

• Embedded firmware (MCUs, RTOS, device bring-up, control logic)

• Edge computing (Linux-based systems, local services, update orchestration)

• Device communications (BLE, Wi-Fi, Thread, MQTT, HTTP, CAN, etc.)

• Cloud services and APIs (telemetry ingestion, device management, data pipelines)

• Internal tools for manufacturing, testing, deployment, and support

• Early product surfaces that shape user experience and system behavior

We expect you to lean into unfamiliar areas — and we’ll support you while you do.

Why This Role is Unique

• You’ll work on real hardware that ships to customers — not demos or internal tools.

• You’ll have broad ownership instead of a narrow specialization.

• You’ll help define how things are built, not just what’s built.

• You’ll see your work go from prototype to production quickly.

• You’ll be part of shaping a new category at the intersection of energy, hardware, and software.

What We Offer

• The chance to build something that actually matters

• Working alongside a focused, experienced team

• Competitive salary and equity compensation

• Medical, dental, and vision health insurance

• 401(k) retirement savings

• Flexible work arrangements in San Francisco or Denver