Staff Data Engineer, Service Ontology

**What to Expect**

Tesla’s Energy Intelligence team needs a hands-on architect who can build the semantic and agentic backbone that keeps our industrial, residential, Supercharger, Solar, and future energy products running at peak health. You will merge deep knowledge of large-scale energy operations with cutting-edge autonomous analytics to expose the “semantic truth” of our business and turn raw telemetry into decisive, automated action.

You will design and own the Semantic Operational Layer - a unified knowledge graph and business ontology that fuses fleet data, internal apps, and enterprise warehouses into a single reasoning substrate. On top of this layer, you will build agentic AI workflows that isolate performance anomalies, recommend mitigations, and coordinate cross-functional responses across Industrial Energy, Residential Energy, and Solar Product & Service Engineering. Your work removes blind spots, eliminates hallucination in AI outputs, and accelerates how Tesla diagnoses, prioritizes, and resolves fleet-wide issues.

**What You'll Do**

• Architect the Semantic Operational Layer that encodes entities, metrics, logic, and relationships across all Tesla Energy verticals, enabling precise reasoning for AI/ML agents
• Partner with data engineering, product, and service teams to ingest streaming telemetry, contextual business data, and historical knowledge into a trustworthy ontology
• Build tooling that surfaces actionable insights for Industrial, Residential, and Solar stakeholders, closing the loop from detection to resolution
• Define best practices for evaluating agentic AI performance, ensuring reliability, interpretability, and measurable business impact
• Lead development of autonomous decision-intelligence agents that detect, explain, and remediate operational and maintenance challenges across global energy fleets
• Mentor engineers on semantic modeling, knowledge-graph design, and agentic orchestration patterns

**What You'll Bring**

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or related quantitative field, or equivalent experience
• Have built or deployed systems powered by LLMs or generative models and understand how model behavior affects product experience
• Expertise with graph databases, ontology tooling, and representation learning; fluency in Python and one compiled language for high-performance services
• Proven ability to fuse telemetry, transactional, and operational datasets into a coherent analytic layer that powers real-time decisioning
• Familiarity with LangChain for building LLM-powered applications, including experience with chains, agents, and integrations with vector stores or external tools
• Demonstrable ability to solve complex engineering problems that deliver on results
• Experience with energy, industrial IoT, or high-availability fleets preferred

**Compensation and Benefits**

Benefits

Along with competitive pay, as a full-time Tesla employee, you are eligible for the following benefits at day 1 of hire:

• Medical plans > plan options with $0 payroll deduction
• Family-building, fertility, adoption and surrogacy benefits
• Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both have options with a $0 paycheck contribution
• Company Paid (Health Savings Accounts) HSA Contribution when enrolled in the High-Deductible medical plan with HSA
• Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• 401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits
• Company paid Basic Life, AD&D
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance (90 day waiting period)
• Employee Assistance Program
• Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions, Accrued hours for Hourly positions), and Paid Holidays
• Back-up childcare and parenting support resources
• Voluntary benefits to include: critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance
• Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs
• Tesla Babies program
• Commuter benefits
• Employee discounts and perks program

Expected Compensation

$100,000 - $216,000/annual salary + cash and stock awards + benefits

Pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements dependent on the position offered. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

Tesla is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer committed to diversity in the workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, gender identity or any other factor protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.

Tesla is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. Please let your recruiter know if you need an accommodation at any point during the interview process.