Full-Time

Software Engineer

TAR

TAR

11-50 employees

Off-grid power plants for AI data centers

No salary listed

San Francisco, CA, USA

In Person

Category
Software Engineering
Required Skills
CAD
Rust
Python
Data Engineering
TypeScript
Robotics

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Requirements
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of shipping systems that other people depend on.
  • Real depth in at least one of TypeScript, Python, or Rust.
  • Ability to work directly with power systems engineers, civil engineers, and project developers and turn their tacit knowledge into software.
  • Desire to understand how a power campus works, including tracker-row spacing and inverter behavior in an islanded grid.
  • Bias toward first-principles reasoning and shipping software that is put into use.
Responsibilities
  • Build high-fidelity simulations of an entire campus spanning photovoltaic systems, inverters, batteries, controls, and data-center load, including sizing decisions, dispatch strategies, degradation assumptions, and outage scenarios.
  • Work with power systems engineers and outside stability consultants to translate domain knowledge into models that run thousands of times per day.
  • Build data pipelines that ingest and normalize LiDAR, digital elevation model topography, geotechnical and soils data, parcel and constraint layers, irradiance and typical meteorological year datasets, and environmental overlays into a geospatial substrate for automated layout.
  • Turn site boundaries and constraints into buildable designs, including grading and racking layouts, direct-current block topology, cable routing and losses, equipment placement, bills of materials, and drawing artifacts for external engineers and engineering, procurement, and construction partners.
  • Compress site-design cycles from months to days and evaluate hundreds of site variants.
  • Build the Construction operating system as the system of record for converting approved designs into built campuses, tracking piles, trackers, and modules from the laydown yard through installation, assigning inventory and work packages to deployment robots, maintaining live as-built site state, and carrying data into operations and maintenance.
  • Help bring the energy-management system in-house through real-time control, supervisory control and data acquisition and telemetry integration, and testing infrastructure for an islanded campus.
  • Operate software controlling physical assets with appropriate operational safety.
Desired Qualifications
  • Prior work in solar, storage, microgrids, or utility-scale power, including familiarity with PVsyst, PSCAD/EMTP, PLEXOS, SAM, or similar tools.
  • Experience with supervisory control and data acquisition, Modbus/DNP3, IEC 61850, or industrial control stacks.
  • Experience with computer-aided design or geometry pipelines, or generating engineering deliverables programmatically.
  • Production experience with commercial or open-source solvers such as Gurobi, HiGHS, CPLEX, or OR-Tools, and judgment about when a formulation is the problem rather than the solver.
  • Background in robotics, autonomy, or another domain where software must operate reliably in the physical world.
  • Comfort with numerical simulation, geospatial and geographic information system data, real-time or embedded control systems, or computational geometry and optimization.

TAR builds and operates behind-the-meter power plants for AI data centers that cannot wait out a utility interconnection queue. The company designs islanded microgrids pairing solar, battery storage, and gas peakers, then manufactures, installs, and runs them, handling power electronics, microgrid controls, dispatch software, and site construction in-house. Compared with grid interconnection, which can take years to clear, an off-grid plant can be sited and energized on the developer's own schedule, and TAR says it is working with a large compute provider and targets 5 GW by 2028. Its goal is to remove power as the constraint on AI buildout by owning generation end to end.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Seed

Total Funding

$27M

Headquarters

Texas

Founded

N/A

Get referred to TAR

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Forbes reported TAR raised $27 million in June 2026 at a $500 million valuation.
  • Pat Becker said TAR already targets over 200MW in 2027 and several gigawatts in 2028.
  • AI data centers face five-to-seven-year interconnection queues, making TAR's speed proposition urgent.

What critics are saying

  • TAR still lacks a public customer name, exposing extreme concentration risk around one neocloud.
  • Natural-gas backup and local permitting trigger regulatory delays, especially for multi-state site builds.
  • If the first 10MW deployment slips, TAR's 2027 200MW plan loses credibility fast.

What makes TAR unique

  • TAR uses factory-prefabricated behind-the-meter power systems, cutting deployments to roughly three months.
  • Its mix of solar, batteries, wind, and gas backup targets 24/7 AI data center power.
  • Pat Becker says TAR prices below typical behind-the-meter PPAs while avoiding grid queues.

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Benefits

Meal Benefits

Unlimited Paid Time Off

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Relocation Assistance

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

0%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

0%
Business Insider
Jun 29th, 2026
Creator economy founders pivot to data centers, raise $27M at $500M valuation to power AI infrastructure

Leonhard Soenke and Patrice Becker, who founded creator economy startup Throne in 2021, have pivoted to launch TAR (Transformative American Resources), a data centre energy startup. The company recently raised $27 million in seed funding at a $500 million valuation from an undisclosed strategic investor. TAR aims to reduce time-to-token for AI models by building modular, behind-the-meter energy systems combining solar, batteries, wind and natural gas. Soenke told Business Insider the shift came from seeking larger impact opportunities, as the creator economy has matured and become crowded. The founders spent six months transitioning Throne to trusted team members before relocating from New York to San Francisco and Austin to pursue the data centre opportunity.

Forbes
Jun 15th, 2026
Startup Raises $27 Million To Solve Two Massive Data Center Problems

Data centers are noisy and power-hungry. This startup might have a solution that prioritizes off-grid renewable energy.