Job alert: Y Combinator-backed Spark seeks engineer for $15B clean energy AI tools

Spark, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-powered tools for renewable energy developers, is hiring its first full-stack software engineer to join the founding team in San Francisco. The company has already secured major clients including Colliers Engineering & Design, Standard Solar (backed by Brookfield), Pine Gate Renewables (backed by Blackstone), and Cypress Creek Renewables, representing over $15 billion in clean energy financing and 70GW+ of renewable power capacity.

What you should know: Spark is positioned at the intersection of AI and clean energy infrastructure, targeting one of the most complex challenges in renewable development.

• The company builds applications that help solar and battery storage developers navigate regulatory requirements and local factors across all U.S. jurisdictions.
• Current clients include industry leaders with pipelines delivering clean power to millions of households annually.
• The team combines leadership experience from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Brex, WeaveGrid, and the Department of Energy.

The role details: This founding team position offers $150K-$200K salary plus meaningful equity for candidates with 3+ years of full-stack experience.

• Engineers will work directly with founders and customers to prototype AI-driven features including agentic web browsing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and large-scale data extraction.
• The tech stack includes TypeScript, NextJS, NodeJS, and Postgres, though exact technology matches aren’t required.
• The position requires five days per week in-person collaboration at their SOMA office near Montgomery BART station.

In plain English: Agentic web browsing means AI that can automatically navigate websites and gather information like a human would. RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) is a technique that helps AI provide more accurate answers by first searching through relevant documents before responding.

Key qualifications: Spark seeks engineers who can balance technical excellence with business impact and customer interaction.

• Required experience includes building full-stack web applications with frontend and backend components, plus willingness to learn AI tools and renewable energy domain knowledge.
• Bonus qualifications include experience with large data-intensive systems, programmatic LLM usage, AI agents, RAG implementation, or previous startup/energy sector work.
• The role explicitly requires comfort with business involvement and customer interaction, not just coding.

Company backing: Spark has secured funding from prominent tech and energy investors following their Y Combinator W24 batch.

• Investors include AI Grant (Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, and Daniel Gross, Safe Superintelligence co-founder), plus founders of Brex, Plaid, and Helioscope.
• Founded in 2023 by Julia Wu, the three-person team is currently active and scaling.

Why this matters: The position represents an opportunity to directly impact the energy transition while working with cutting-edge AI technology in a well-funded startup environment, targeting the massive renewable energy infrastructure market that requires sophisticated regulatory navigation tools.