Product Analysis and Validation Engineer

Job Title: Product Analysis and Validation Engineer  

Department: Product and R&D

Reporting Line:  Engineering Validation and Performance Team Lead

Location: Kampala Uganda & Berlin, Germany

Job Grade: Hay Level 15

About ENGIE Energy Access 

ENGIE Energy Access is one of the leading Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGo) and mini-grids solutions provider in Africa, with a mission to deliver affordable, reliable and sustainable energy solutions and life-changing services with exceptional customer experience. The company is a result of the integration of Fenix International, ENGIE Mobisol and ENGIE PowerCorner; and develops innovative, off-grid solar solutions for homes, public services and businesses, enabling customers and distribution partners access to clean, affordable energy. The PAYGo solar home systems are financed through affordable installments from $0.19 per day and the mini-grids foster economic development by enabling electrical productive use and triggering business opportunities for entrepreneurs in rural communities. With over 1,700 employees, operations in 9 countries across Africa (Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), over 1.5 million customers and more than 8 million lives impacted so far, ENGIE Energy Access aims to remain the leading clean energy company, serving millions of customers across Africa by 2025.  

www.engie-energyaccess.com 

Job Purpose/Mission  

The Product Performance Team is responsible for defining and delivering the product test/validation activities and for managing the post-launch product performance. This will be achieved by working with the leaders of Product Management and Research & Development to define and manage the development processes, drive the test and validation activities, and implement performance monitoring metrics (and corrective actions) for the product after launch.

The main purpose of this role is to be an analyst for the Product and R&D Team – analyse hardware data for projects at all stages of the product lifecycle. This starts off with data analysis of product usage of new devices being piloted, includes analysing the quality and yield data while scaling up manufacturing, and all the way to monitoring the rollout of hardware/firmware updates to existing products. The day-to-day projects involve software tools (SQL, Tableau, and Python) but the goal is to analyse hardware data, so it is important to have some hardware background. There is a lot of room in this role to innovate how hardware data gets analysed at scale – with 1.2 million customers over 9 countries – this role has a high impact on improving the customer experience by enabling the R&D team to make use of all this data to improve existing products and inform future product design.

Responsibilities 

• Lead development of hardware initiatives to utilize analytics (including GSM/network data) to inform product improvements and support/diagnostic improvements.
• Build & maintain dashboards for the R&D team to roll out new firmware & monitor product health and performance.
• Build & maintain dashboards for the product performance team to identify and monitor potential quality issues at manufacturing.
• Act as a representative for product performance-related questions & support external team initiatives utilizing hardware data.
• Conduct AD HOC analysis and reports for hardware, firmware and manufacturing investigations.
• Identify uses of GSM data to help other business functions. Collaborate with external business functions on implementation and rollout of analysis or tools.
• Support data projects to guide hardware strategy.

Knowledge and skills  

Experience: 

• 4+ years of experience working on data analytics.
• 4+ years of experience working with embedded systems and low-cost high-volume consumer products.
• Strong experience of debugging and root cause analysis of consumer product failures.
• Excellent communication skills and experience writing reports.
• Experience with Tableau and other data visualization tools.
• Ability to work in a multi-cultural team, spread across several time zones will be key to success in this role. We are looking for a pro-active and assertive individual who can collaborate with key stakeholders across the organisation.

Qualifications: 

• Minimum BS Electrical Electronics, Hard Ware, Computer Science or similar degree

Language(s):  

• English 
• German and Chinese is a plus

 Technology: 

• Experience of Hardware and Firmware development
• Background in product testing and validation
• Experience in writing complex MySQL queries and RedShift queries
• Experience with Tableau or other BI tools
• Knowledge of lithium-ion battery and solar technology
• Programming skills in high-level object-oriented languages (Java, Python, etc.)
• Experience with Jupyter, R, Pandas, and other data analysis programs is a plus

We thank all applicants for their interest, however due to the large volume of applications we receive, only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.  

ENGIE is an equal opportunity employer, promoting diversity and committed to creating an inclusive environment for all. All applications are screened based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without any regard to origin, age, name, sexual identity, orientation or preference, religion, marital status, health, disability, political opinions, union involvement or citizenship. Our differences are our strengths!