Technical Support Engineer

Description

Come join SparkMeter’s Customer Success team in Nairobi and help increase electricity access in developing countries. As a Technical Support Engineer, you will support our microgrid and distribution utility customers around the world as they set up and operate our smart metering system. You’ll engage with our customers everyday and work to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction by making sure that they are getting everything they need as they build and expand their grid projects using our products.

You'll focus on:

• Resolving technical escalations to support SparkMeter’s customer base. We provide remote support for our customers around the world. You’re excited to work with customers to help analyze and resolve issues they encounter. When solving problems, you’ll pay close attention to detail in order to diagnose the root cause and document interactions for visibility to the team and to improve the product and its support processes
• Providing on-call troubleshooting and issue resolution coverage. You will monitor customer requests on weekends on a rotating schedule with your peers in addition to providing technical support during regular business hours.
• Conducting remote system upgrades. You'll help our customers leverage the latest features in our software by making sure their system is up to date.
• Improving our support processes. You'll make recommendations and revise standard operation procedures as needed to enhance the issue resolution experience for the team and our customers.

Where You'll Work

You will be a member of our Nairobi team and work from our Kenya office. You can expect 5% travel to meet with customers, as needed. Travel will typically be to visit customer offices or to remote sites.

Type of Role

This is a full-time role with benefits. Compensation is made of salary and performance bonus.

SparkMeter was founded to promote opportunity in underrepresented communities initially but has since grown into serving urban & peri urban communities as well.

SparkMeter’s core value is opportunity: the opportunity for underserved communities to achieve great things. That's why our mission is to increase access to electricity in underserved communities - it is electricity and the services derived from it that unlock and create those opportunities. This value is reflected in our hiring ethos: we believe that the strongest teams have diverse backgrounds. Our approach to hiring has been validated by academic and industry studies that show that workforce diversity improves team and business performance. (It has also been validated by the quality of the team we’ve assembled so far!) We encourage applications from members of groups currently underrepresented in energy, web development, & software engineering.

Requirements

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in CS, or other quantitative engineering/science degree, or equivalent professional experience (3+ years).
• 2+ years of experience with a higher level programming language (ideally Python or R), familiarity with relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL) and command prompt/terminal. Software Development experience or experience with APIs is a plus.
• Experience with ticketing systems (e.g. Zendesk, JIRA), and CRMs (e.g. Salesforce) strongly preferred.

You will be a good fit for this role if you have:

• Knowledge of Smart Metering technology. You are excited to learn more about the technical concepts behind SparkMeter’s product. A background in energy or software are examples of experience that will help you grasp our product’s evolving capabilities and limitations in order to ensure that our clients can meet their objectives. Direct experience with Smart Metering technology is strongly recommended.
• Experience working with customers. You are comfortable engaging with customers via email, over the phone, and in person and owning outcomes to solve their problems. You have excellent interpersonal skills and work well in a team environment.
• Strong communication skills. In order to connect to customers, understand their needs, and create great documentation, you should have excellent written and verbal communication skills in English. If you are business proficient in other languages, that’s great too! For example, speaking French would be highly advantageous, as we have many French-speaking customers.
• Empathy. Our customers and partners are based in over 25 countries all over the world and come from many different backgrounds. You should be comfortable and enjoy talking with people who come from cultures different from your own.
• A connection to energy and energy access. Our mission is to increase access to electricity in underserved communities, and your connection to our mission will inform your work and connect you to your mission-driven colleagues. Having exposure in the field in which we work will help you better understand our customers, where they are coming from, and their needs.
• Self-starter discipline. You love devising new systems and getting all things in their right place. We’re a startup, which means we are building systems as we grow and require leadership from everyone in our company for this.