By Liz Hampton and Hyunjoo Jin
(Reuters) -Electric vehicle maker Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Inc is looking to staff an energy trading team to support its battery and renewable power projects, according to Tesla's website and an employee post on the career site LinkedIn.com.
The company has expanded operations to include home solar and large battery storage facilities, which currently account for a small portion of its total revenue. It also recently applied to begin marketing electricity in Texas.
"I'm building a new team at Tesla focused on Energy Trading and Market Operations," according to a LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/ this week by Julian Lamy, who described himself as a senior optimization software engineer for Tesla.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
"Tesla Energy is on their way to becoming a distributed energy provider at the residential level as well as utility scale," said John McClellan, a managing director at recruitment firm Aurex Group.
The company plans to use an in-house automated trading platform, called Autobidder, for "bidding batteries into multiple wholesale energy markets," according to the job description on Tesla's website.
The job requires expertise in wholesale electricity markets, and the candidate will "lead trading and real-time operations for battery, solar, and wind projects participating in wholesale energy markets," using Autobidder, according to the job posting.
The senior energy trading analyst position will be based in Palo Alto, California, according to the posting.
Last month, Tesla Energy Ventures applied to the Public Utility Commission of Texas to become a retail electric provider.