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Key statistics

The identity block — every fact is canon, none is generated.

6 of 8

Track

Individual contributor

Family rungs priced

P1 · P2 · P3 · P4 · P5 · P6

49-0000

industrial_energy_operations

Coordinates

3 / 4 spaces

pay@2 · 2026-07

What this role is

Sets technical direction and best practices for solar installation, maintenance, and crew training across the organization. At the Principal Professional (P6) level, the role owns organization-wide architecture and the hardest problems, strategic, open-ended problems shaping the technical future, and drives organization-wide. Recognized authority; multiplies many teams.

What this level does

Own fleet reliability, availability, and cost optimization across the entire wind, solar, and battery storage portfolio as the organization's principal operations authority
Design and refine proprietary operations and controls methods — SCADA/RTU configuration standards, predictive-maintenance techniques, availability models — that raise the performance ceiling for every site in the fleet
Set the technical standard for how energized plants are operated and maintained, becoming the internal reference for controls engineering and grid-operations decisions
Diagnose systemic barriers to fleet performance and pioneer new approaches when established maintenance strategies stop yielding gains
Provide high-level mentorship to principal and senior technicians/engineers and influence peer professionals and OEM roadmaps across the industry

Knowledge applied: Principal, field-shaping mastery of solar/wind/storage operations and controls; designs proprietary methods and standards rather than applying existing ones.
Complexity & problem solving: Visionary, fleet-defining problem-solving; pioneers new predictive and controls techniques when established approaches stop yielding gains.
Collaboration & interaction: Influences company grid-operations strategy, peer professionals, and OEM roadmaps; recognized internal and industry authority.
Typical experience: 15+ years; principal operations expert owning fleet reliability outcomes.

Skills at this level

AC/DC solar equipment inspection and repair: — Inspects, evaluates, tests, cleans, calibrates, and maintains solar module systems, mounting hardware, combiner fuse boxes, inverters, switchgear, circuit breakers, transformers, and batteries, using test equipment to diagnose and fix faults in energized PV systems.
Data acquisition and metering systems: — Maintains and troubleshoots data acquisition systems, revenue meters, weather stations, and relays that record and report plant electrical output and environmental conditions.
SCADA monitoring and control: — Uses SCADA (with Wonderware and similar HMIs) to remotely monitor, control, and interrogate plant equipment, spotting underperformance and driving corrective action across sites.
PLC and RTU field-device work: — Configures, tests, and troubleshoots the PLCs, RTUs, and field devices that automate control and telemetry between plant equipment and the SCADA layer.
Safety, LOTO, and EHS compliance: — Applies solar-industry safe work practices, lockout/tagout, and environmental, health and safety fundamentals when working on energized AC/DC systems, and enforces these practices for crews and contractors.
PV plant maintenance craft: — Performs solar photovoltaic construction and O&M craft — assembly/installation/maintenance of PV systems, cleaning, compacting, grading, painting, sanding/stripping — while reading plans and specifications.
Corrective, preventive, and emergency maintenance execution: — Plans and executes corrective, preventive, and emergency maintenance, repairs, and replacement of on-site equipment to restore and sustain plant availability.
Performance and reliability engineering: — Analyzes operating and performance records to diagnose recurring faults, optimize maintenance intervals, and drive fleet-wide reliability, availability, and cost optimization across solar, wind, and storage assets.
Equipment records and performance logging: — Compiles and maintains records of system operation, performance, and maintenance, then interprets those records to determine the need for adjustment, relocation, or replacement of equipment.
Technician training and crew coordination: — Trains and mentors new technicians, helpers, and laborers, and coordinates maintenance work with other crafts and co-workers to sequence outages and minimize plant downtime.

Model-authored from 20 retrieved sources, then adversarially reviewed by an independent judge panel and held to a minimum-evidence floor before publication. Distinct from corpus-extracted content, which is labelled as such.

Pay across the ladder

Solar Operations — median with , by . Real canon data.

National-base pricing — this family's function differential is pending review, so dollar levels are not function-adjusted (level-over-level % is unaffected).

Pay figures are modeled estimates from our market equation — level-differentiated, with honest-wide bands. They refresh as new leveling evidence lands; treat per-role dollars as directional.

Demand — is the field growing, or just turning over?

SOC 49-0000 · national

Employment growth 2019–2024, BLS OEWSobserved

+88.3%Wind Turbine Service Technicians · United States

5,960 → 11,220 jobs

2,300 openings / year, split into:

growth 684

replacement / exits 1,616

Growth — new jobs (30%)Exits — backfill (70%)

30% of hiring here is genuine expansion; the rest backfills people who move on.

Projected growth 2024–34 expanding: +49.9%
Growth share of hiring: 30%
Exit / retention pressure moderate: 70%
Openings / year: 2,300

Two quantities, kept apart: observed = employment growth differenced from two BLS OEWS vintages (what already happened); projected = BLS Employment Projections 2024–34, openings decomposed into growth + exits (growth derived from projected employment change). Neither is a pay figure.

Where this role sits — growth vs. pay

level P6 held

Demand axis is projected growth (not raw openings — that just measures churn). A curated, de-duplicated set of recognizable occupations held at this level; this role is highlighted.

Where it pays — by metro

OEWS metro median

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA$324k

San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA$290k

Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV$269k

Boulder, CO$265k

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA$265k

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH$254k

Lexington Park, MD$247k

Trenton-Princeton, NJ$246k

Pay only — metro-level demand isn't in public data (it needs job postings). National median $194k; the demand-cube initiative will add growth-by-metro.

What changes across the ladder

Level-distinction canon isn't available for the adjacent levels of this profile yet.

Level differentiators

What separates P6 (P6 — Principal Professional) from the levels around it — this level only. Every word is real canon for this profile.

Scope: Organization-wide architecture and the hardest problems
Autonomy: Defines direction; minimal oversight
Complexity: Strategic, open-ended problems shaping the technical future
Impact: Organization-wide
Decision rights: Sets technical strategy for a major area
Leadership: Recognized authority; multiplies many teams

Full level-by-level matrix (side by side across the ladder) lives on the Ladder drill-down — not here.

Promotion

P6is the top of this family's ladder — progression from here is a lattice move (see adjacent roles below), not a rung.

Performance criteria for this profile render in the assessment kit →

People also watch

Nearest coordinate neighbors — same , same level. Each row's (confident / review / no match) comes from its — computed, not curated.

Profile	Key	Median	Δ structural
Senior Director of Solar Operations	jf_solar_operations::M6	$241,631†	confident0.06
Staff Solar Installation Expert	jf_solar_operations::P5	$138,423†	confident0.06
Director of Solar Operations	jf_solar_operations::M5	$188,371†	confident0.12
Lead Solar Installation Specialist	jf_solar_operations::S5	$60,631†	confident0.12

†National-base pricing — this family's function differential is pending review, so the dollar level is not function-adjusted.

Capability cluster

O*NET 49-9081

Core to this role. Click any element with an ⓘ for its O*NET definition. A job-specific capability model (SkillFrame) will sharpen this and add worked examples.

The Job Swatch

P6

jf_solar_operations::P6

Principal Solar Operations Engineer

Solar Operations

The swatch is JobFrame's core primitive: a hueset deterministically by the role's superfunction, the profileKey as its color code, the level ladder, and a content fingerprint. Two swatches that look alike are alike.

Because every role carries computable coordinates, similarity, leveling, and pricing become measurable instead of arguable— the whole point of "Pantone for jobs."

Structural

structural@1

Where it sits— position in the work taxonomy + level (weighted Gower, level > function > focus).

Track: P
Superfunction: industrial_energy_operations
Function: field_operations
Family: solar_operations
Universal level: 6 / 8

Content

content@2

What it's about— a fingerprint over the role's tasks & capabilities.

Two roles can sit far apart structurally yet be close in content — that gap is itself a signal.

3-state matching

How any two swatches compare — a real distance in coordinate space, resolved to a calibrated verdict (never a fake "94% match").

Battery Storage Operations · P6review0.17

Drilling Operations · P6review0.17

Field Maintenance · P6review0.17

Field Measurement · P6review0.17

Mining Operations · P6review0.17

Field Operations · P6review0.17

Editions — frozen & versioned

structural@1live

Released 2026-06-17

content@2live

Released 2026-07-28

pay@2live

Released 2026-07-02

semantic@1live

Released 2026-07-02

Coordinates belong to a frozen, versioned edition — a coordinate computed today still means the same thing next quarter. Re-fitting issues a new edition, so comparisons are never silently redefined.

How to read this profile

Every number here is traceable — to a named source, a stated method, and an as-of date — and each value is labeled by how we know it: observed from data, computed by a model, projected forward, or governed canon. Nothing is a black box, and nothing is invented to fill a gap.

Where every number comes from

What	Source & method	Edition	State
Median pay + range	JobFrame pay equation (function base × family multiplier × level × focus differential)	pay@2	computed
Pay across the ladder	Same equation applied at each universal level	pay@2	computed
Demand — growth & openings	BLS Employment Projections; openings decomposed into growth + exits	EP 2024–34	projected
Pay by metro	BLS OEWS metropolitan medians	OEWS 2024	observed
Level distinctions	JobFrame universal-level canon (scope · autonomy · complexity · impact · decision rights · leadership)	canon	canon
Capability cluster	O*NET Knowledge / Skills / Abilities	O*NET 49-9081	computed
Coordinates	JobFrame coordinate system — structural (weighted Gower) + content fingerprint	structural@1 · content@2 · pay@2 · semantic@1	computed
Related roles	Nearest neighbors in the structural coordinate space	structural@1	computed

The principles behind the numbers

Ranges, not false precision

Pay is P10 · median · P90, never a single misleading number.

Three honest states, never a fake %

Role matches resolve to confident / review / no-match — a calibrated verdict, not a made-up percentage.

Provenance on every value

Each number carries whether it's observed, computed, projected, or canon — so you always know how much to lean on it.

Gaps shown as gaps

When a figure isn't available at the grain you need, we say so — we don't fabricate a number to fill the cell.

Frozen, versioned editions

Pay and coordinate editions are pinned, so a comparison you make today still means the same thing next quarter.

Privacy by min-N

Any aggregate over people is suppressed below a minimum count, so no individual is identifiable.

Freshness

As of2026-07-30Editioncanon-v2@2.1.0-completeSourcecanon-v2 cell + salary-benchmark (model)