Head of Platform Foundations, Kaluza
£115-144k
+ Discretionary Bonus
More information about location
3+ days a week in office
Intelligent software platform powering the future of energy
Posted today
Intelligent software platform powering the future of energy
501-1000 employees
Posted today
£115-144k
+ Discretionary Bonus
More information about location
3+ days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To help decarbonise the world.
Role
Who you are
- Proven experience in a senior leadership role running an organisation’s Platform function, with a track record of hiring, mentoring and scaling high-performing platform and SRE teams through engineering managers
- Experience developing and delivering a multi-year platform strategy and roadmap with product counterparts
- Hands-on experience implementing AI tooling across an engineering organisation and measurably changing how it builds software, not just piloting it
- A track record of running production reliability at scale (SLOs, incident management, on-call) for a multi-tenant or multi-instance SaaS platform, with a strong grounding in modern cloud-native architecture (AWS preferred)
- Experience owning cloud unit economics and making the investment case to Finance, plus strong partner management with technology vendors
- Exceptional stakeholder management, including presenting platform strategy, risk and investment cases to executive leaders. Experience with DORA, internal developer platforms or platform-as-a-product thinking, regulated or data-sovereignty-sensitive markets (energy, utilities, financial services), or running a platform for external clients is a bonus
- We want to meet people from all walks of life. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be, and we recognise talent on merit and potential. If you’re excited about the role but don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you
What the job involves
- Team: Platform Foundations
- Contract: Permanent
- Reporting To: Director of Platform & Security
- As Head of Platform Foundations, you’ll own the core foundations every Kaluza engineer and client builds on: the internal platform, production reliability, release pipelines and AI tooling. You’ll lead four teams (Platform Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Release Engineering, and AI & Enablement Engineering) through your engineering managers. The platform runs Kaluza Retail, Energy Optimisation and Customer Care across dedicated client instances in the UK, Europe and Asia-Pacific
- Your mission is to make Kaluza scale reliably, with more clients, markets and meters without a matching rise in cost or operational load. You’ll also turn our early gains from AI-assisted engineering into how the whole technology organisation works. (The data platform sits outside this role, though you’ll own the AWS accounts it runs in.)
- Set the multi-year platform strategy and roadmap with Product and Engineering leadership, so platform investment follows client and commercial priorities
- Make Kaluza scale repeatably at falling marginal cost, delivering new client instances, mass meter migrations and new markets
- Lead Kaluza’s AI transformation in engineering, embedding tooling, agents and guardrails into the development lifecycle, measuring the impact, and partnering with Product on the AI capabilities we offer clients
- Make reliability a feature clients trust, through SLOs, incident response and continuous improvement across all client instances
- Own how software ships at Kaluza, with CI/CD and progressive-delivery practices that let teams deliver safely and often, using frameworks such as DORA to measure and improve velocity
- Own cloud unit economics and FinOps, making investment and savings recommendations to the technology budget, and manage strategic partners including AWS and Datadog
- Lead, mentor and grow a UK-based team with a global remit, building a culture of engineering excellence and developing the next layer of leaders, while working with Security and IAM to build in compliance (ISO 27001 / 22301) and data residency
Our take
The energy landscape is one of the most dynamic and fast-evolving sectors in the world. More and more energy retailers are looking to move further toward digitisation and reap the benefits of modern technology in an increasingly connected world. But many are struggling with the transition, held back by legacy operating systems which slow them down, drain resources, and hamper innovation.
This is where Kaluza comes in. An ecosystem of platforms whose services range from energy billing to smart electric vehicle charging, Its real-time cloud platforms transform supplier operations, reducing the cost to serve and boosting customer engagement. Essentially, its platform is aimed at helping businesses streamline their operations, saving them time, effort, and money which can be better invested elsewhere.
Kaluza is riding the momentum of a growing desire for sustainable business and services. Its program relating to electric car charging, for example, will be able to capitalise on huge new demand in that sector - over 100,000 electric cars are already on the roads in the UK, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance has predicted that electric cars will account for over 50% of new global car sales by 2040. As the globe moves further towards sustainable use of energy in the coming years, Kaluza could be very well positioned to capitalise.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
33% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
Jun 2024
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $100m
Company benefits
- Progressive leave policies - including leave dedicated to the moments that matter to you the most
- Annual discretionary bonus
- Dedicated personal learning and home office budgets
- Flexible working — we trust you to work in a way that suits your lifestyle
- 26 days holiday
- Kaluza Share Scheme
Company HQ
Kensington, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Melissa Gander
(CEO)Initially joined Kaluza as COO before becoming CEO in 2024. Previously worked at OVO Energy in a number of roles, including Managing Director of Smart Metering and Group COO. Prior to that, they worked at INEXUS as a Process and Performance Analyst and a Customer Manager.
People progressing
Joined as Senior Technical Product Manager in 2017, promoted after 2 years to Head of Product, promoted again in 2024 to their current position as Director of Product.
Joined Kaluza in 2020 as a Software Engineer, and in less than 2 years was promoted to Software Engineering Manager and again promoted in 2023 to Senior Software Engineer.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Kaluza
- We are developing an dedicated Early Talent programme with a focus on underrepresented groups, offering different training opportunities within the business
- Our applicant tracking system, Greenhouse, also anonymously tracks the diversity of each candidate pipeline, so we can proactively take action when a pipeline needs to be more diverse
- We invest in tools, like Textio, and focused diversity job boards to help us reduce bias in our job postings and recruitment activity
- Commitment in improving diversity across our Tech Teams and working with companies to improve the tech ecosystem as a whole, specifically have committed to 25% Women in Tech by 2025
- We've signed up to numerous charters, like the Tech Talent Charter, Race at Work Charter and Trans in the City, to show our continuing commitment to improving I&D within Kaluza and the wider community
- Within Kaluza we have belonging communities set up, to offer support and forums for everybody
- We run monthly Inclusive Hiring Skills & Bias training that are open to all Kaluza employees
Share this job
View 29 more jobs at Kaluza