The Wunder Engineering Handbook

Mission

Wunder is building world-class software to tackle one of the hardest problems in climate: accelerating adoption of commercial solar.

We specialize in providing turnkey solar assets to real estate firms and their tenants. What makes us unique is our ability to leverage software to programmatically deploy energy solutions across large nationwide portfolios while reducing operational costs for both us and our customers.

Our platform, Astra, manages the entire solar development lifecycle. Astra’s capabilities span site selection, cashflow modeling, contracting, risk mitigation, project management, and system monitoring. This integrated approach enables Wunder to cost-effectively deliver and operate solar in the Commercial & Industrial (C&I) sector–one of the largest and most underpenetrated markets for solar in the U.S.

Engineering Philosophy

The engineering problems we’re solving are complex and, at times, high stakes. We’re dedicated to building a first-class engineering team and culture focused on solving hard problems.

We’re committed to continuous improvement. This document describes the current state of our process and tools so we can quickly onboard new team members and have a place to record our decisions. Our tools and process are constantly changing as we learn and grow. We regularly solicit feedback from all team members so we can all improve together.

Culture

We strive to do the best work of our careers at Wunder. We believe engineers make the biggest impact when they can work on hard problems over long periods of time, and so we invest heavily in each other so we can learn, improve (and have fun!) for years.

We Share Goals, so we always prioritize the team’s success over the individual’s. We’re continually collaborating, teaching each other, improving our tools, and refining our processes.

To provide time to explore new ideas, each engineer has dedicated “Exploration Time” and a personal development budget. The personal development budget can be spent on resources related to software (conferences, subscriptions to newsletters), but it doesn’t have to be! You can spend this on any activity where you learn something, like cooking classes or a first aid course.

We work hard, but also sustainably. Our on-call rotation is usually low-stress and we systematically improve the safety of our system. We also recharge by using Wunder’s unlimited PTO.

Last, but definitely not least, we have fun together regularly at team events and off-sites. We’ve attended concerts, baseball games, camping trips, happy hours and lots more.

Wunder Engineering in Stats

  • 5 hours per day for focused, heads-down work (known as the No Meeting Zone)
  • Language distribution:
    • 81% Ruby
    • 9% Typescript
    • 4% Slim/HTML
    • 1% CoffeeScript
    • 5% Other
  • Roughly 1 deploy per work day, per engineer