Builder Mindset | Techno-economic Forecasting
About Sunairio
Sunairio forecasts energy supply and demand with granular, site-specific accuracy using probabilistic modeling, high-resolution climate data, and machine learning. Our core product, Sunairio ONE, generates thousands of realistic scenarios (ensembles) to surface uncertainty and extreme-event risk so that traders, operators, and developers can manage volatility, optimize decisions, and plan for extreme events. This is not weather for weather's sake. We translate weather and climate risk into high-impact grid and market outcomes.
About You
You are a technical leader in quantitative finance, energy economics, or machine learning who is a builder, not just a researcher. You have built models of complex systems, improved them, and shipped them into production. You aren't a traditional power engineer. You are a data-first, economic thinker who views the grid as a massive, stochastic market.
You have a founder mindset and are driven by impact. You may not be a founder, but you operate like one.
You have:
- High Autonomy: You identify the bottleneck in a model and fix it without a roadmap.
- Commercial Intuition: You build systems that create durable value for traders and developers, not just high R-squared values on a test set.
You are:
- A Technical Polymath: You are as comfortable training a deep learning model as you are analyzing ISO marginal loss vectors.
- A Disciplined Experimentalist: You match the method to the problem, whether that is a well-specified regression, a gradient-boosted tree, or a neural net. You know where modern ML earns its keep and where solid fundamentals do the work.
Why this role matters
The energy transition is making power markets increasingly volatile and non-linear. Traditional structural models are too slow, and "black box" models often fail during extreme events. The industry needs a new breed of market modeling that blends physical fundamentals (transmission, heat rates, fuel prices) with machine learning. You will be the architect of that bridge, turning trillions of data points into the price signals that will guide the next decade of energy investment.
Key responsibilities
- Build Market Models: Design and deploy probabilistic models for power region fundamentals (load, renewables, unit outages), congestion, and LMP.
- Strengthen the Data Layer: Automate ingestion of regulatory filings and unstructured market reports, using modern NLP tooling where it meaningfully speeds the work.
- Bridge Physical and Financial: Work with our weather and climate team to translate atmospheric signals into market-moving outcomes (basis risk, price spikes, and curtailment).
- Productionize and Scale: Partner with Engineering to ensure models are performant, scalable, and integrated into the Sunairio ONE platform.
- Market Strategy: Bring strong judgment on what matters to a power trader or a renewable developer, helping shape the product roadmap based on market reality.
What we’re looking for
- The "Builder" Proof: Clear evidence you have built an end-to-end modeling system (for example, a price forecaster, a trading system, or a grid simulator), not just tweaked existing code.
- ML Fluency: Deep expertise in modern machine learning applied to noisy, real-world numerical data, plus the judgment to know when a simpler model is the better answer.
- Energy Market Savvy: A strong grasp of how ISO/RTO markets function, including how supply stacks and transmission constraints drive price.
- Technical Toolkit: Mastery of Python (NumPy, Pandas, Xarray) and experience with large-scale data orchestration.
- Probabilistic Mindset: Comfort with uncertainty, Bayesian inference, and the nuances of evaluating distributional fidelity rather than just point-forecast accuracy.
- High Velocity: A preference for shipping "version 1" quickly and iterating based on performance rather than seeking academic perfection.
