Location: Remote (North American time zones) or Hybrid (Chicago or Bay Area)
Commitment: Flexible
ChargeMate is building AI customer support and network operations agents for the EV charging industry. Founded by Brad Crist (ex-Volta product manager) and Brian Lange (ex-head of data science at IDEO), ChargeMate helps operators provide better customer experience and reliability using AI-driven automation.
ChargeMate participated in 500 Global’s accelerator program (Batch 36) last fall and was an active member in the Joint Office ChargeX Consortium’s Driver Experience group.
Brad studied environmental science and energy policy at Georgetown and has an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas. He spent over a decade as a consultant and operator in energy and electric mobility, including work for electric utilities, EV manufacturers, auto financiers and EV charging providers. While at Volta Charging, Brad led the team developing the mobile app for drivers to find, start and pay for charging, tripling both monthly active users (MAUs) and network size. He holds several AI/ML patents for products and POCs in ad technology and computer vision.
Going on road trips in a Rivian was supposed to be the dream, but Brad’s friends didn’t have the patience when the group stopped to charge and things didn’t go according to plan. Poorly maintained hardware, poorly designed user experiences – and the only lifeline being a 1-800 number on the side of the charger and another poor experience going back and forth with someone on the phone. This has to be a better user experience if the widespread adoption of EVs is ever going to happen! This is what inspired Brad to flip his Rivian and use the money to start ChargeMate.
Brian has a computer engineering degree from Northwestern and spent most of his career as a software and data science consultant, first at a small data science consultancy called Datascope and most recently at the design and innovation consultancy IDEO. He did customer research, imagined new products and features, and built custom prototypes, apps, and APIs for clients. He also worked on policies, management systems, hiring processes, and operational data apps for the consulting companies themselves and managed a variety of data scientists and other roles. He’s also got some visual design chops that he can flex when necessary.
Brian and Brad met via My Climate Journey’s Slack community. Brad had just pivoted the idea for ChargeMate from a B2C EV routing app to a B2B platform focused on helping drivers when they arrive at the charger and he was looking for a technical co-founder to help bring it to life. Brian was trying to find a way to put his swiss-army-knife skillset to work in the climate tech / energy space. It was a great fit and they’ve been working together since.
Brian and Brad work together remotely, periodically travelling to meet up in person in the Bay Area, Chicago, and elsewhere, often around useful events for the company like conferences, customer or investor meetings, etc.
Both Brad and Brian are passionate about:
We’re looking for an experienced (4+ years) software developer to join us and accelerate our product development, adding new functionality, data sources, integrations, channels, and applications to our existing platform, and going from idea to prototype to prod on new concepts on our roadmap.
We're at an inflection point as a company -- scaling up nationwide with new enterprise customers while actively fundraising to support global clients. We're looking to start with a contract engagement to get you familiar with us and our product and trial how well we work together, with an eye towards a possible full-time role in the future. Potential projects involve full stack web development and new AI-powered features and products that fit into our existing offering.
The eventual role we want to fill will be responsible for the “how” of what we build next — architecture choices and a lot of producing actual code. You’ll be joining a small company, so there isn’t a lot of management to be done just yet other than yourself (and your coding agents). But as we grow, there should be opportunities to expand the engineering team either by hiring or contracting— so experience and interest in hiring, leading, and mentoring other engineers is a plus.
Must have demonstrated experience with:
Bonus points if you have experience with:
While we're starting with a contract-based role, our intention is to build long-term relationships with great people. As the company expands, we'll revisit full-time opportunities -- including salary, equity and benefits packages.
If we’re interested in your application, we’ll have a conversation or two and if both sides want to move forward with some contract work, we’ll scope that together at a fair market rate.