Software Engineer

We're on a mission to make a big green dent in the universe by building a truly sustainable energy system globally.

That means making power greener, smarter, and more affordable for everyone.

We put customers at the heart of everything we do: with always-fair prices, transparency and outrageous customer service.

We drive system change: with transformative tech to make renewable energy the norm and end global reliance on fossil fuels.

Octopus Energy Group is made up of 10 businesses spanning 6 countries across 3 continents, including: Octopus Energy Retail, Kraken Technologies, Octopus Energy Generation, Kraken Flex, Octopus Electric Vehicles, and the Octopus Centre for Net Zero. More on OEG @ octopusenergy.group

At Octopus Energy Trading, we’re on a mission to reshape the future of energy. As part of Octopus Energy Group, we’re creating an innovative approach to trading that will accelerate the transition to a Net Zero world. With the growth of renewables and a push toward decarbonising heating and transport, greater flexibility in the grid is essential. We are building cutting-edge technology to optimise everything, from domestic EV charging to grid-scale batteries, to meet the global demand for energy flexibility.

 

We’re looking for passionate and unconventional thinkers to join us on this journey, bringing a diversity of experience and ideas to shape a more efficient, flexible, and sustainable energy system.

 

With an increase in variable and distributed supply, using data for trading and forecasting has never been more important. Octopus has always had a tech-first approach, and our trading and analytics tools are all built in-house by specialised domain teams, focussed on areas like grid-scale batteries or market fundamentals, all building on a common platform that is managed by our core engineering team.

 

We are seeking a software engineer to join the core engineering team and help own the developer experience. You will be responsible for designing the frameworks and tooling that allow our domain teams to develop, ship, and manage event-driven microservices with zero overhead, as well as building and maintaining core microservices that can be re-used by domain teams.

 

Please note, this role is a minimum of 2-3 days a week from our London office - but you’d be welcome in more frequently if you’d like to!

💚 Why else 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 Group 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 were recently named the UK's top company to work for, and we ranked in the top ten in the Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2024. Our Group CEO, Greg has recorded a podcast about our culture and how we empower our people. We’ve also been placed in the top 10 companies for senior leadership

• 🎁 Visit our UK perks hub - Octopus Employee Benefits

 

 

P.S. Our process usually takes up to 4 weeks, but we’ll always do our best to flex around what works for you. Along the way, you’ll chat with our recruitment team and your Recruiter will help you throughout different stages. Got any burning questions before then? Drop us a message at [email protected] and we’d love to help!

 

 

• Build and maintain the platform that underpins our low-latency event-driven microservices architecture, ensuring it is robust, performant and highly available (our human and algo trading processes run 24/7)

• Build and maintain core microservices that can be re-used by domain teams as well as supporting them to build their own

• Develop intuitive and well tested tooling that free domain teams up from implementation details, enabling them to focus on their specialism

• Partner with domain teams to scope and prioritise opportunities, and deliver solutions that make their lives easier

• Lead by example on software engineering best practices at OE Trading, levelling up domain teams through great documentation, knowledge sharing and driving AI adoption

• Advanced-level Python

• Passionate about clean code and software engineering best practices

• Enthusiastic about enabling others through great platform, tooling and developer experience

• Experience managing production systems on Kubernetes (or similar) with observability tools like Grafana, Datadog and Sentry

• Knowledge of any many of the following as possible:

  • Asynchronous Python

  • Microservices

  • REST APIs

  • Event driven architectures

  • Streaming technologies like Redis Streams, Kafka or RabbitMQ

  • WebSockets

  • Kubernetes

  • Autonomy and pragmatism, as projects will be varied and self-driven

  • A team player mindset and to be comfortable jumping into whatever is required - we’re still a start up!
    
    

  Bonus points for experience of the following…

  • Continuous intraday power trading in the UK or EU

  • Experience developing low-latency systems where correctness is critical

  • Building frontends using TypeScript e.g. Angular or React

  • High performance languages like Go and Rust

  • Analytics tooling like Databricks, dbt, Streamlit and Lightdash

• Python for as much as possible

• Redis as our database and S3 for long term storage

• FastStream for streaming microservices

• FastAPI for RESTful microservices

• Airflow for orchestration

• Docker and Kubernetes to build and run our microservices

• GitHub for repos and CircleCI for CI/CD

• AWS for infrastructure, deployed with Terraform / Spacelift

• Linear for project management

• Notion for documentation

• Claude, Warp and Cursor for AI agents