Contract Senior Software Engineer, Octopus Energy Group
German Market Entry, Octopus Electric Vehicles
2+ days a week in office
The UK's most awarded energy supplier
Be an early applicant
The UK's most awarded energy supplier
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
2+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To make a big green dent in the universe by building a truly sustainable energy system globally.
Role
Who you are
- Native/C2 German and Professional English fluency
- Extensive experience as a Senior Full-Stack Developer focused on speed and business enablement
- Deep expertise in TypeScript, React, Node.js, and SQL/noSQL
- Proven experience delivering prototypes or MVPs that were later deprecated or rebuilt, demonstrating a comfort with building transient solutions
- Strong understanding of modern development workflows, including Git and CI/CD pipelines
- Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to work autonomously and proactively
- Motivated by business success and rapid validation over building a permanent, polished codebase
- Comfortable with the ambiguity inherent in a new market entry
- Biased toward shipping minimum viable solutions rapidly
- Don't feel like you meet all of our hiring criteria? That's OK, apply anyway! We'd love to hear from you and have a conversation
What the job involves
- You'll be one of two engineers, working directly with the country General Manager to rapidly build and validate our product for the German market
- This role is perfect for a full-stack developer who is excited by the challenge of quickly shipping minimum viable solutions and directly enabling business growth
- This isn't just a job; it's an opportunity to be an integral part of our foundational team in Germany, shape our future, and truly own your work
- Build Fast, Deliver Impact
- This is a unique, high-impact role where your primary measure of success will be market validation and speed-to-launch, not technical perfection
- You'll be pioneering the engineering effort for a new market, working within a small, resource-constrained, cross-functional team
- You must be comfortable with the fact that the tools and code you develop will be long-term temporary, designed to validate the market and replaced on a 1–2 year horizon if successful
- You will be expected to work proactively and independently, translating high-level business goals into prioritised, shippable technical tasks
- You will be making critical trade-offs between security/maintainability and speed/insights, particularly when dealing with PII and payments
- Developing modern, responsive, and reusable frontends with React and TypeScript
- Building fast, secure, and scalable backend services and APIs using Node.js, integrating with SQL and noSQL databases and 3rd party APIs
- Deploying and maintaining your own systems on cloud hosting providers
- Engaging in rapid prototyping, unit testing, and agile development cycles, using GenAI tooling where appropriate to accelerate delivery
- Working in a paired environment as the senior engineer, while adhering to technical guidelines provided remotely by our UK team
Application process
- Please apply with your CV in English
Our take
According to Octopus, the energy industry in the UK is ruled by a handful of complacent companies peddling fossil fuels, pricing trickery, and poor customer service. Aiming to disrupt the status quo with sustainable energy, Octopus entered the market in 2016 and now supplies energy to millions of homes in a number of countries. Octopus has made a name for itself in energy circles largely because of its “Kraken” technology platform, which it claims is able to reroute energy from renewable sources around a network far more efficiently than competitors.
Octopus further differentiates itself through its aspiration to make everything as easy as possible for consumers, from the simplicity of their bills and the fact that customers are not locked into a contract, so they can leave at any time, to offering customer service over email and social media at times that suit customers. It aims to make the eco‐friendly choice the easy choice, so all of its tariffs use 100% green electricity, while being cheaper than competitors' non-green tariffs.
Its continually creating innovative new products too. For example, Octopus Tracker, where prices change daily to guarantee you get the market rate; Agile, where the price changes every half hour to enable you to benefit from cheap electricity when the sun shines, the wind blows, and the networks are under-utilised. One of the current challenges the company faces is that its products are more complex than its competitors, given that it uses 1000x more data than traditional energy companies. Because of this, it's exploring ways to explain to customers exactly how their products work.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Dec 2023
$800m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Jul 2022
$225m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $2.6bn
Company benefits
- Equity Option Scheme
- Pension Scheme: We'll pay 5%. You can decide what you contribute, starting from 3%
- Money Coach: You may want to think about financial planning. The company has an arrangement with Octopus Money Coach . They offer the opportunity to talk with a professional coach
- Holidays: We're all grown ups, so we don't count your holidays here. We work hard and so we know you need to play hard as well (within reason of course)
- Flexible working: We're passionate about a genuine work-life balance here and we don't pay people to watch a clock. Need to catch that school nativity or work from home? That's cool
- Free Breakfast + other stuff: ice lollies if you're lucky)! Weekly on a Friday we all get together (this happens virtually too) for company updates and drinks - we call it Family Dinner
- Tech: We want to get the best out of our people and get that everyone is slightly different. Have a certain tech requirement? We’ll do our best to get it
- Car Salary Sacrifice: Browse the wide selection of electric vehicles and get a sample quote under our workplace salary sacrifice scheme. If approved, the monthly leasing costs are taken directly from your gross salary each month meaning you're saving on paying some tax
- Cycle to Work Scheme: The Cycle to Work Scheme is a cost effective way to “buy” a bike up to a value of £2.5K, which hopefully is enough for a decent commuting bike, even an electric one. This extends to the cost of accessories and safety equipment as well as the bike
- Season Ticket Loan: Commuting to the office on the regs? If you travel more than twice a week, it’s worthwhile getting an annual ticket. With our Season Ticket Loan, you can spread out the cost over 10 months. It’s quick and easy to sort. Once approved and ordered, your season ticket will be posted to you within 5 days or so
- Maternity leave: 16 weeks full pay + 8 weeks half pay + 15 weeks statutory maternity pay
- Paternity leave: 12 weeks full pay
- Private Medical Insurance: Say goodbye to long waiting lists! For anyone who wants some additional peace of mind when it comes to their health, we offer Private Healthcare Insurance at different levels of cover. The monthly costs are taken directly from your gross salary and spread across 12 months. You even save on National Insurance
- Gym & Yoga: You can get up to 25% discount on gym memberships and we have 45 minute live yoga classes open to all Octopus staff twice a week!
- Headspace: Need some calm in your life? We have 'Octopus Headspace Licences' available
- Eye Test: Free eye test vouchers for all colleagues who use Visual Display Units (VDU). Long spells of VDU work can often be visually demanding and can lead to tired eyes, discomfort, temporary short sightedness and headaches
Company HQ
Soho, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Greg Jackson
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously an Adviser at Ashcombe Advisers for 9 years and a Non-Executive Director at Zopa for 7 years.
James Eddison
(CTO)Previously CEO at Claripoint for 7 years and CTO at Tangent Labs also for 7 years.
Stuart Jackson
(Co-Founder & CFO)Previously a Director of "Foundation" Business Unit at Barclaycard for 2 years and Chief of Staff, Secured Lending SBU at Barclays also for 2 years.
People progressing
Joined as Marketing Assistant, being promoted to Marketing Executive after 6 months and again to Junior Product and Marketing Manager after 7 months. After 8 months they became a full Product and Marketing Manager.
Joined as Senior Talent Partner, being promoted to Talent Manager after 1 year and again to Head of Talent Acquisition after 8 months.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
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Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Octopus Energy Group
- Unconscious Bias workshops for interviewers and hiring managers
- Octopus Energy Equality Foundation
- Partnership with the Saracens High School - inspiring future generations - https://www.saracens.com/powering-futures-together-saracens-high-school-octopus-energy/
- Octopus Energy Internships - https://octopus.energy/blog/ada-lovelace-tech-internship/
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