Electrical Engineering Intern

We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world’s largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full-stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.

About Voltair

Voltair is building the world’s first distributed network of drones for earth observation. We envision a world where after a major storm, an operator of critical infrastructure can simply sign into our platform and dispatch a drone. Within minutes, we will identify high risk hazards and stream issues directly to crews on the ground. We serve power utilities, hyper scalers, wildland firefighting and DOTs. With our long range drones, we can achieve autonomous coverage of the entire continental U.S. with ~5000 ground installations.

We operate as a full stack service, meaning we build drones, deploy them, capture data, analyze it, and deliver the results on our software platform. Our first market is power utilities. We’ve serviced multiple utilities already, and are preparing for our biggest deployment with a large multinational utility later this year.

The Role

We’re looking for an Electrical Engineering intern to assist with wiring harness prototyping / assembly, PCB bring-up, circuit design, and more. This is a hands-on role where you’ll work directly with our Faraday-1 drone platform and Lighthouse ground stations that are actively being deployed with customers across the country.

You’ll work in-person at our lab in San Francisco, collaborating closely with our engineering team to develop our technology. We expect around 10-20 hours of work per week. Responsibilities will be varied day to day and include a mix of assembly and design.

Qualifications and Experience

Required:

• Currently a Junior or Senior at a Bay Area university and studying Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field.
• Experience soldering PCBs and wiring harness connectors.
• Familiarity with circuit debugging and common lab equipment (oscilloscope, function generator, etc.)
• High attention to detail (you will be working on flight-critical systems!)

Nice to have:

• Experience working on drones or RC aircraft
• FAA Part 107 licensed
• Previous internship experience
• Familiarity with Ardupilot

Our drones recharge inductively from power lines by harvesting the magnetic field with a current transformer. We build custom drones with COTS parts. We collect visual and thermal data. Soon we'll fly our drones BVLOS over LTE, but today our field technicians collect data on-site. We run this data through a MV pipelines and then deliver the GIS and PDF reports to our customers.

Our Hardest Challenges

• Performant recharging on distribution lines
• Drone weather hardening & reliability
• Tele-operations & autonomy
• Mission planning with (1) range / recharge locations (stochastic!) (2) weather (3) FAA and other compliance constraints + traveling inspector problem
• Cost effective uplink & data management / MV on the edge