Strategy Analyst Intern - Summer 2020
Do you worry about the future of our planet and wonder how you can make a positive impact? Are you excited by the opportunity to make a difference from day one at a company driven by the mission of “Helping to Save The Planet” by “Reinventing the Transmission Industry”? If so, read on to see if this is the internship you have been dreaming about.
Smart Wires is looking for a Strategy Analyst Intern to join us for the Summer of 2020. This intern will learn from some of the most progressive management leaders in the tech industry while supporting a variety of strategic workstreams. The Strategy Analyst Intern will be in a unique position within a company that is revolutionizing the energy industry while maintaining a culture of innovation, selflessness, passion. This position can be located remotely in the Bay Area but requires frequent travel to our Union City, CA headquarters and to our coworking space in San Francisco.
THE POSITION
The Strategy Analyst Intern’s days will never be routine, with a diverse mix of workstreams to support company-wide initiatives. The dynamic candidates we seek will be very sharp, strategic, organized, detail-oriented, flexible, creative, serious, committed, and passionate about their work. The ideal candidates possess superior communication skills, are strong team players who enjoy working with all levels of staff, and are prepared to roll their sleeves up and dig in on a new task every day.
This is a 12-week paid internship. Although completing this internship doesn't guarantee a full-time position at SW, it provides an opportunity to gain experience in the industry and be considered for a future role. Some of the tasks you will tackle during the summer include:
- Develop a deep understanding of our products and solutions. Don’t worry, we’re not expecting you to be able to reverse engineer them, but you should develop a thorough understanding of our solutions that enables you to communicate about them internally and more importantly externally.
- Use your research skills to gather and synthesize intelligence on customer targets, strategic partners, vendors, regulators and anyone/thing that might affect our business. We’ll need you to be creative as well as analytical; thinking outside the box gives us a competitive edge. Our team will rely on your ability to capture this information and distill it for internal ‘customers’ –in many cases, you’ll be directly informing the strategy or tactics of our business.
- Engage in strategic initiatives for C-suite, including new market and new product analysis. Projects sometimes involve the C-suite and often require fact-checking, data analysis, market trends, research, and diligence, usually with a strategic plan for quickly capturing the data and requirements of a fast turn-around. Your role is to support such initiatives, which often provide tremendous growth opportunities.
- Develop materials used by our executives to engage external parties, as well as other content relating to strategy, marketing or sales workstreams. Whether it’s a press release, marketing flyer, sales presentation, test report or internal strategy document, you’ll have the opportunity to touch and shape our image.
- Interface constantly with various internal stakeholder groups, ranging from sales and marketing to R&D. Working at a small, fast-paced company has many advantages: one of which is the opportunity, even as an intern, to learn from and collaborate with individuals across the commercial, research and operations teams.
- Become indispensable and recognized as yet another company superstar. If you can do all of the aforementioned things, this one should be straightforward.
We want someone who will master all those things in just a few months and then we want them asking, “What else can I do to contribute?” And that’s when the real fun begins…
IDEAL CANDIDATES
- Currently working towards a BS/MS/Ph.D. in business or engineering with a demonstrated interest in energy and the environment
- An excellent communicator, including the ability to concisely package and message material to senior executives
- A creative problem solver
- Highly proficient in the Microsoft program suite
- Self-motivated and responsible
- A true team-player
- Determined to make a positive, long-lasting impact on climate change
- A curiosity or passion for the global electric utility industry
- Previous internship or project experience is a plus
APPLICATION PROCESS
If you have been reading closely, you wouldn’t expect a typical recruiting process. And, we’d hate to disappoint you. To begin our rather unique recruiting process, please submit your resume and a thoughtful cover letter which explains why you believe you would be the perfect fit for this job. Please note that your cover letter MUST specifically address each of the ideal qualifications described below. So, your first opportunity to impress us is...
- Measurable Successes – Academics is one place where people typically compete with others in a (mostly) objective and fair environment. For that reason, it is great to see candidates that excelled at some type of school. But if you don’t have that, share something else that demonstrates your commitment to success, ideally competing against a group of other really motivated
- Strategy Experience – Everyone who applies will have the required experience. In order to help us make the right choice, tell us why your experience is something we can’t live without.
- It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye – Tell us about a boss or coworker that nearly or actually cried when you left their team (either in a business or academic environment) and your best guess as to the key reasons that they were nearly in tears. What is it specifically about you that they miss?
- And Gosh Darn It, People Like You – Relate something that gives us confidence that if we were on an elevator with you and the elevator malfunctioned between floors, that we wouldn’t hate being stuck there with you for more than three hours while the doors are being repaired by the elevator services team.
THE COMPANY
Driven by a world-class leadership team with extensive experience delivering highly impactful products, Smart Wires (www.smartwires.com) works with utilities globally to address their biggest challenges around providing clean, reliable, and affordable power. We deploy our revolutionary power flow control technologies to address problems that are impacting the rapidly evolving transmission system: changing generation, congestion, critical reliability issues and more. Our solutions are unique—they provide broad system awareness and control, and their modular nature enables flexible deployments that can be rapidly scaled up or down to accommodate changing network needs. Additionally, these solutions are a complete paradigm shift for utilities that are accustomed to building new lines and raising the voltage on their existing lines to solve grid problems. Smart Wires gives these utilities a set of tools to make better use of their grids. Today, the technology is rapidly becoming part of utilities’ tool kits as they look to integrate renewables, minimize their environmental impact, and increase constrained transfer capacity.
THE CULTURE
We are carefully engineering our culture to attract stunning performers who thrive in a “Freedom and Responsibility” culture. Borrowing heavily from the cultural breakthroughs offered by Netflix, this culture rejects tight management of detailed tasks, focusing instead on hiring great people capable of managing important missions with fairly limited direction and supervision. We give even those with limited work experience the resources they need and believe that certain “superstars” are hard-wired to deliver nothing but truly excellent results. This is an atmosphere of rapid professional development and incredible learning. Our goal is to place superstars in every role so that we rely on and trust each other to do our jobs brilliantly, knowing that this strategy ensures a fun, exciting workplace and nearly guarantees continued commercial success.
**All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, status as a protected veteran, or citizenship status.**