Head Of Engineering - Kraken Utilities

Help us use technology to make a big green dent in the universe!

Kraken powers some of the most innovative global developments in energy.

We’re a technology company focused on creating a smart, sustainable energy system. From optimising renewable generation, creating a more intelligent grid and enabling utilities to provide excellent customer experiences, our operating system for energy is transforming the industry around the world in a way that benefits everyone.

It’s a really exciting time in energy. Help us make a real impact on shaping a better, more sustainable future.

Our Team 

Kraken is the technology platform behind Octopus Energy! The platform is also offered to utilities in a SaaS model and is based on a modern, cloud-based architecture with continuous deployments that enables high-speed innovation. 

Kraken Utilities 

We’re now charging our Kraken platform to power utilities beyond just energy (think water, broadband,..) and have created a new business area Kraken Utilities. Over the last year we have built this team from scratch to re-architect, design, and develop our Kraken software platform to solve complex industry wide problems within the water and broadband sectors (customer experience, water leak detection software). 

The Kraken Utilities team is now 50+ engineers and have already signed 4 clients (Portsmouth Water, Severn Trent, Leep, and Cuckoo Broadband). We are currently in a very exciting growth phase. Together with the rest of the team, you will bring the same revolutionary customer experience, operational excellence and speed of innovation that Kraken is powering across energy retailers to other sectors. 

As Head of Engineering for the Water or Broadband Industry, your main responsibility will be to manage 4~5 sub-teams working on building the water/broadband product and implementing Kraken in this other utility. You will manage Engineering leads and work closely with engineering teams as they identify issues and implement creative solutions to address them. You will manage your own project deliverables, contribute to product strategy and help develop and grow our teams. We are particularly excited to hear from people willing to immerse themselves in their area of expertise, from environmental sustainability to engineering excellence, and show strong product ownership. 

Our Technology 

All technology is written and maintained by a global, multi-disciplinary team of around 700 engineers. This includes server-side, client-side and mobile engineers working closely with UX experts, copywriters and designers. We’re low on process, with a high level of trust given to individuals.

Most of our server-side applications are written in Python. The Kraken platform is built using Django and Celery, and makes extensive use of GraphQL and REST APIs.

We use an immutable infrastructure approach to manage our AWS environments. We heavily use EKS, RDS Aurora, AmazonMQ, S3 and EventBridge in our platform architecture. We practise continuous deployment and release new versions of Kraken around 200 times per day.

Engineering standards are high. We pair program, thoroughly review and test code before it deploys, and maintain fast, high-value test suites. We have weekly tech talks, a day a month devoted to sharpening our internal tools, upgrading dependencies, paying off technical debt - we call it “spa day” - and we can often be found at tech meet-ups and conferences.

Many of our coding conventions are open-source and we maintain a tech blog. Kraken is a great place to learn, work with some talented engineers and level-up your skills.

What you'll do:

• Lead and scale the Kraken Utilities team, overseeing a talented group of over 25 engineers.
• Embed a great engineering, problem solving and customer-first culture
• Provide leadership and mentorship to 5~7 engineering leads to build high-performing teams.
• Ensure that the engineering team ships consistently high quality, reliable, scalable, secure and performant software.
• Architect new components of the Kraken platform and drive continuous development to meet evolving client needs.
• Collaborate with client stakeholders to facilitate smooth migration and adoption of our platform as a service (SaaS).
• Work closely with the existing Kraken team to help build a consistent platform
• Collaborate closely with the Telco team to ensure consistency
• Communicate with a wide range of stakeholders (technical and non technical).

What you'll need:

• Technical depth and breadth to drive the future development of the platform
• Structured problem solving skills to decompose and solve ambiguous problems
• Ability to hack a quick prototype and to properly architect a system design (and the ability/pragmatism to decide when to do what)
• Inspirational leadership style and entrepreneurial energy
• Past experience in one of the areas like enterprise software, Large scale transaction processing, AI and machine learning software is desirable
• Scaling up platforms serving a few geographies and 10X millions to multi geography multi entity 100X millions would be ideal
• Familiarity with key technology components underpinning Kraken’s stack ie python, django, django-REST-framework, AWS, kubernetes, terraform, react and graphQL, is required
• Experience managing teams of teams (20+ engineers is desired).
• Stakeholder management experience.

Why you'll love it here:

• Wondering what the salary for this role is? Just ask us! On a call with one of our recruiters it's something we always cover as we genuinely want to match your experience with the correct salary. The reason why we don't advertise is because we honestly have a degree of flexibility and would never want salary to be a reason why someone doesn't apply to Octopus - what's more important to us is finding the right octofit!
• Octopus Energy is a unique culture. An organisation where people learn, decide, and build quicker. Where people work with autonomy, alongside a wide range of amazing co-owners, on projects that break new ground. We want your hard work to be rewarded with perks you actually care about! We won best company to work for in 2022, on Glassdoor we we're voted 50 best places to work in 2022 and our Group CEO, Greg has recorded a podcast about our culture and how we empower our people
• Visit our perks hub - Octopus Employee Benefits