The Company:
Sungrow North America is a leading provider of renewable energy solutions, specializing in the development and manufacturing of photovoltaic inverters and energy storage systems. The company offers a comprehensive range of products and services designed to optimize the performance and efficiency of solar power installations. Sungrow North America aims to provide sustainable and reliable energy solutions to meet the growing demand for clean power and is known for its commitment to innovation, high-quality standards, and exceptional customer service.
The Position:
The Service Innovation & Development Engineer is a hybrid position based in the Sungrow Houston, TX office, reporting to the Service AI Agent product owner within the Strategic Expert team. The Service Innovation & Development Engineer is an intelligent agent with Sungrow domain knowledge, deployed in Sungrow's company business software platforms including Microsoft Teams. Today it tracks and escalates unanswered field requests, answers technical questions from archived Q&A, and identifies spare parts from photos using OCR, image embeddings, catalog retrieval and LLM-based evidence checking. The developer owns the codebase end to end (design, implementation, deployment and operation) and leads the next wave of integrations with Sungrow business systems. This is a hands-on role on a small team, working directly with the field service engineers who use the tool every day.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
- Design, implement, test and ship features for the Service AI Agent (Node.js/TypeScript, Microsoft Teams SDK, Azure Bot Framework) across the full stack: Teams ingress, request lifecycle, background workers, retrieval and data layer.
- Own the production stack: PostgreSQL schema and knex migrations (pgvector, pg_trgm), the Python SigLIP image-encoder worker, public ingress (Cloudflare tunnel today, Azure App Service as the target), and the deployment runbooks.
- Extend the spare-parts identification pipeline: OCR of board labels and barcodes, hybrid retrieval (identifier, text-embedding and image-similarity), LLM evidence comparison, company part-number validation and the human confirmation and learning loop.
- Build integrations with Sungrow business systems: PLM 3DEXPERIENCE (parts and BOM), iQMS (serial-number trace and as-built records), SharePoint via Microsoft Graph, and the Airtable spare-parts inventory; later, controlled write-back for ordering and repair workflows.
- Deliver structural-part PDF drawing matching and BOM linkage, the next planned work package.
- Build the real-data evaluation harness: expert-labelled test sets, regression suites, accuracy and latency comparisons; use the results to adapt OCR and retrieval models.
- Operate the service: monitoring and Application Insights telemetry, incident response, catalog and data refreshes, and permission hygiene (Teams RSC scopes, Graph app roles, Key Vault secrets).
- Manage LLM and embedding usage (OpenAI API): prompt and model-version changes, cost and latency tracking, content-minimization and data-handling rules.
- Write and maintain design documents, deployment runbooks and user guides for field engineers.
- Coordinate with Sungrow HQ R&D and IT in China on API access, authorization and data sources.
- Set coding standards, CI and the release process; review and mentor the part-time developer on the team.
- Gather feedback from field service engineers and the Strategic Expert team, prioritize the backlog with the product owner, and deliver in staged rollouts.
- Other duties as assigned.
Minimum Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience.
- Microsoft Azure certifications (AZ-204 Developer, AI-102 AI Engineer) desired but not required.
- Solar, battery, power-electronics or industrial-service domain experience desired.
- 3 plus years of professional software development, including 2 plus years with Node.js/TypeScript in production.
- Experience building bots or integrations on Microsoft Teams and Azure Bot Framework (or a comparable messaging platform), and with Microsoft Graph and Entra ID app registrations.
- Strong SQL and PostgreSQL: schema design, migrations (knex or similar) and query tuning; vector search (pgvector) a plus.
- Hands-on experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI or similar): prompt design, structured outputs, embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation.
- Working Python for ML inference services (PyTorch, transformers, image preprocessing), enough to maintain and extend the SigLIP encoder worker.
- REST API design and integration, OAuth2 and token handling, retries and error handling.
- Git, automated tests (vitest or similar), CI, Docker, and Linux/macOS server operation.
- Must possess effective written and verbal communication skills and the ability to work with field engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
- English Language Proficiency required.
- Mandarin Chinese Proficiency desired but not required (coordination with HQ R&D).
Travel:
- Up to 10% (Sungrow service and training centers and customer sites for user feedback and field testing).
Work Location and Status:
- Contract role based out of Houston, TX.
- No visa/legal sponsorship.
Compensation:
- Compensation commensurate with experience
- Competitive benefits package and employee programs
- Strong personal and company growth opportunities
For candidates in the states of California, Colorado, New York and Washington, the anticipated annual base salary for this role is between $75,000 - $105,000 This range does not include any other compensation components or other benefits that an individual may be eligible for. The base salary offered is dependent upon several factors, including but not limited to job-related skills, qualifications, experience, education, location, or other factors related to the role.
Sungrow is an equal opportunity employer. Due to strong interest in this role, Sungrow will only reach out to those candidates who best meet the requirements of the position. Thank you for your interest in Sungrow.
#LI-LV1