Technical Program Manager Intern
Are you applying to the internship?
Job Description
About Tesla
The Internship Recruiting Team is driven by the passion to recognize emerging talent. Our year-round program places the best students in positions that they will grow both technically and personally through their experience working closely with their Manager, Mentor, and team. We provide an experience that allows for the intern to experience life at Tesla by giving them projects that are critical to their team’s success.
Job Description
We are seeking a highly motivated and detail-oriented Technical Program Manager intern to support our efforts in driving virtual power plant adoption using Tesla’s grid services cloud platform and our suite of residential products, including Powerwall and EV charging. This exciting position will support some of the most innovative work happening in the energy transition. This position reports to the Staff Technical Program Manager for Virtual Power Plants (VPP), Residential Energy. An ideal candidate will possess a mix of interpersonal and technical skills, be highly organized and have a detail-oriented mindset along with a passion for launching new technologies with an unparalleled ability to bring people together as a single team with a single goal.
As a Technical Program Manager intern for VPPs, you will be responsible for launching programs that allow Tesla product owners to earn money with the power they share to the grid. You will launch new programs from initial design to go-live, collaborating across internal and external stakeholders and executing various technical tasks with minimal supervision. This position is highly entrepreneurial and the candidate will be expected to not only execute on assigned duties, but to also design and document new business processes and to drive further innovation to drive scalable solutions that deliver best-in-class customer experience.
What You’ll Do:
• Manage a portfolio of VPP programs, acting as primary point-of-contact for each program.
• Lead new program launches from initial design to go-live, validating key milestones are achieved punctually, resolving bottlenecks, and communicating risks to relevant stakeholders.
• Support external partners who operate VPPs with Tesla Products, advocating standard scalable solutions, answering technical questions, and ensuring issues are addressed and resolved in a timely manner.
• Be an expert on the technical tools leveraged for VPP residential energy products, including Powerwall, and understand their benefits and limitations sufficient to communicate to partners and utility stakeholders.
• Document operation procedures and program details, supporting the longevity of the business and providing updates to senior management on partner performance, and project status.
• Identify product improvements that increase scale, improve operational efficiency, and provide better experiences for customers and partners.
• Coordinate collaboration between business development, product, engineering, support, external partners and utility stakeholders to ensure our team’s goals are aligned with company priorities.
What You’ll Bring:
• Ability to learn practical technical skills quickly, being able to leverage them to perform daily tasks including but not limited to: create/manage tickets in JIRA, run SQL Queries on databases, executing scripts, submitting Github Pull Requests, and Linux command lines
• Comfortable managing multiple projects with a high degree of complexity.
• Excellent communication and presentation abilities to effectively engage with diverse stakeholders, including engineers, operations/support, business, partners, and utility stakeholders.
• Be able to have discussions with Product and Engineering teams, beyond your own technical expertise, sufficient to understand expected behavior of complex solutions, and propose new features that can be implemented with least overall effort.
• Strong interest in the energy industry, including utility operations, grid management, and renewable energy integration.
• Ability to think strategically and creatively to identify opportunities and overcome challenges in the VPP adoption space.
• Experience with software, Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), and power utilities is a strong plus, but not required for candidates who are quick learners.
Important Considerations:
• This position is expected to start in August 2025 and continue through December 2025 or early Spring 2026.
• A minimum of 12 weeks, full-time (40 hours per week), is required.
• International students with CPT work authorization must confirm their ability to work 40 hours per week with their school.
