Director of Engineering, Energicity

Energicity is leading developer of solar and hybrid microgrid utilities in Africa, delivering affordable, reliable, scalable electricity to rural off grid communities, who have never had electricity before. Through leveraging strategic use of local content and right sized engineering, Energicity, and its subsidiaries Power Leone and Weziza Benin have best in class status among the energy access industry.

Based on our core capabilities, Energicity is currently deploying minigrid utilities in concessions in Sierra Leone and Benin to serve 100,000 people. Further, the company is developing new pipeline to develop minigrids to serve another 100,000 people in West Africa in 2022 and 2023. Beyond just providing light, Energicity’s electrification services enable rural off grid communities.

• better health care outcomes with modern health care equipment, vaccines and light for nighttime procedures
• dramatic improvements in test scores for children in school, and
• significant increases wealth and opportunity for rural entrepreneurs and smallholder farmers.

The Engineering Director role is both strategic and technical. The Engineering Director will lead the challenging of innovating, designing and delivering the new generation of solar minigrid systems that deliver safe, adequate, modular and efficient energy to our customers in rural communities across West Africa. We are looking for a resourceful candidate that finds economic solutions and to continue the of modular generation systems that can scale as our communities climb the energy ladder. This is an exciting opportunity to scale our engineering organization and processes as we expand across multiple countries in West Africa.

The position could be based in Freetown, Sierra Leone or Cotonou, Benin depending on the candidate’s preference.

Qualified candidates please send your credentials and cover letter with Director of Engineering in the subject line to career@energicitycorp.com by June 15, 2022.

 The role’s responsibilities include:

• Provide expert guidance and support on existing as well as newly-developed international and local policies (power generation and power distribution) and maintain positive relationships with both internal and external stakeholders
• Lead the development of highly modular and life cycle cost-effective system design leveraging new technology and new design thinking approaches
• Improve our system by monitoring new developments and breakthroughs, advocating for innovative ideas and finding paths to their implementation, this in line with the overall business strategic positioning
• Manage project engineers through the development and the execution of projects from initial portfolio sizing through final project construction, commissioning and operation across Energicity’s footprint
  • Manage project engineers to deliver high quality designs on time and work with team for continuous improvement of system design and coordination with construction teams
  • Guide engineers through system sizing utilizing Energicity and other tools for PV system sizing
  • Develop, at the system and sub-systems level, technical and functional specifications in compliance with locally applicable policies and regulations while in line with our strategy
  • Oversee project engineer’s development of plan sets for construction and work with construction teams through project design changes
  • Oversee preparation of Bill of Materials (BoM) and Bill of Quantities (BoQ) for projects to ensure on-time delivery of projects
  • Develop project estimates for Finance and Construction
  • Guide technical proposal responses including portfolio pricing, working with engineering teams to check technical specifications, and complete preliminary design, system sizing, and estimates
  • Manage teams scoping of new minigrid sites, including land site selection, grid designs, and system sizing
• Build engineering organization and processes based on best practice engineering methods. Strive for a well-defined process that brings results in a rapidly scaling organization.
  • Hire and manage teams of project engineers as Energicity expands into new countries, help and train them to build engineers skillsets and complete projects effectively
• Specify and work with Finance on procurement of major equipment
  • Develop technical specifications for critical components such as PV modules, batteries, and power electronics
  • Identify new vendors of PV modules, power electronics, and batteries that can help to lower the lifetime cost of energy (LCOE)
• Work with Operations teams for planning and designs of system expansions
  • Manage project engineering to conduct energy analysis for project expansion and conduct design of system expansion
  • Work with Maintenance operations for root cause analysis of system faults and identify design changes for system performance improvement.
  • Guide engineers and technical teams for designs of connections for large usage customers such as cell towers and agro-processing.

Skills and Experiences

• Degree in Electrical, Civil or Mechanical Engineering
  • 10+ years of experience in engineering and project management with 5+ years project, design, or maintenance engineering of mid to large scale photovoltaic projects. Experience in off-grid systems a plus.
  • Experience with conducting PV system sizing, including knowledge in being able to do string sizing, conductor sizing, and loss calculations
  • Experience conducting design of distribution grids a plus
  • Experience with PV Syst, NREL SAM, HOMER Pro or other PV system sizing tool required
  • Experience with and knowledge of drafting software such as Autocad, Rhino3D, or Sketchup required
  • Ability to conduct data analysis in Excel or coding languages such as Matlab, Python, or R.
  • Ability to work in fast-paced environment
  • Ability to work in a matrix organization
  • Ability to adapt and roll out new ideas quickly
  • Customer centric mindset
  • Team management skills
  • Problem-solving skills
  • French language is a plus

The core values of our company are:

Honor – just as we honor each other, we honor the communities in which we work.  We respect our clients, we respect our stake holders.   We recognize that we are working across multiple cultures and that we try to understand each other’s perspective – knowing that it is our differences that make us the best. We may not always agree with each other, our customers, our stake holders, but at the core of every interaction must be respect.   

Teamwork – we value our team and we value each other.  We have each other’s back.  We communicate when something is working well and on track, we over communicate when something is not working well or on track.  We trust each other and trust that we are all working for the good of the company – and if something isn’t working the way we think it should, the course of action is to communicate, to be solution oriented, and to have each other’s back.

Learning – we strive to always be learning as an organization and as individuals.  We are solution oriented in all things.   If there’s a problem, we’re always looking at ways to fix it.  If there’s not a problem, we’re always  looking for ways to innovate to be the best we can be.  We set up experiments and tests to try to do things better, we learn when things work, we learn when things don’t.  We aren’t afraid to fail, we ARE afraid not to learn.

Excellence – Everything we do must be of the highest quality from building and maintaining solar systems, to our software systems, to our documentation.  We double and triple check our own work and each other’s work.  We take responsibility for making things great; we also take responsibility and fix things immediately with anyone who is impacted if anything is less than great.