Service Innovation & Development Intern

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 Intern keeps the Service AI Agent healthy and growing between major releases. The Service Innovation & Development Intern is an intelligent agent with Sungrow domain knowledge, deployed in Sungrow's company business software platforms including Microsoft Teams; it answers field-service technical questions, escalates unanswered requests, and identifies spare parts from photos. Working about 20 hours per week from the Sungrow Houston, TX office (hybrid), and reporting to the Service AI Agent product owner within the Strategic Expert team, the developer takes well-scoped features, bug fixes and data tasks from the backlog and covers the routine maintenance the service needs: catalog updates, health checks, regression tests and documentation. The role suits an experienced developer who wants flexible hours or a graduate student in computer science or a related field.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Implement scoped features and bug fixes in the Service AI Agent codebase (Node.js/TypeScript, Microsoft Teams SDK) with tests, following the standards set by the full-time developer.
• Maintain the spare-parts catalog pipeline: import new catalog releases, manufacturer-to-company part-number mappings and reference photos; run indexing and embedding backfills; reconcile missing or conflicting records.
• Curate evaluation data: collect real technician queries and photos, obtain expert labels from the Strategic Expert team, maintain the regression test set, and run before/after comparisons for each release.
• Perform routine operations: health checks of the bot, image encoder, database and public tunnel; log review; restart and redeploy per the runbook; report anomalies.
• Write and run database migrations and data-cleanup scripts (PostgreSQL, knex).
• Review bot conversations for quality: misclassified requests, wrong part matches and unhelpful replies; file reproducible issues with evidence.
• Keep documentation current: runbooks, setup guides, release notes and tips for field engineers.
• Support rollouts to new teams and channels: app installation with Resource-Specific Consent, configuration commands and onboarding.
• Prototype small improvements (prompt tweaks, ranking thresholds, OCR post-processing) and measure their effect on the test set before proposing them for release.
• Other duties as assigned.

Minimum Requirements:

• Pursuing or holding a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field; graduate students welcome.
• Solar, battery or industrial-equipment familiarity desired but not required.
• 1 plus year of software development experience with TypeScript/JavaScript and Node.js; internships and substantial academic projects count.
• Working SQL and comfort with PostgreSQL; able to write migrations and data scripts.
• Basic Python for scripts and for running the image-encoder service.
• Familiarity with Git, automated tests, and the command line on Linux or macOS.
• Interest in LLM and retrieval-augmented applications; some exposure to OpenAI or similar APIs.
• A consistent weekly schedule of about 20 hours, coordinated with the team's Houston business hours.
• Must possess clear written communication skills and be comfortable reporting status asynchronously.
• English Language Proficiency required.
• Mandarin Chinese Proficiency desired but not required (reading HQ catalog and supplier data).

Travel:

• None expected.

Work Location and Status:

• Internship role based out of Houston, TX.
• About 20 hours per week.
• 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 hourly rate for this role is between $25.00 - $30.00 per hour. 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.

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