Job Description
We believe energy should be better - for you and the environment.
We believe energy should be better - for you and the environment. We’re a leading energy technology company providing a better experience for our customers through transparency, honesty and simplicity. Better for the planet, through real long-term investment in renewable generation and a low CO2 future. Better value, by throwing away the old business models of the “Big 6” and instead building a business that’s fit for the 21st century. We make energy green and flexible for consumers, with fair and transparent pricing. Through our home developed platform, cloud-based billing, and sophisticated use of data science, modelling and AI, we’re redefining what is possible in energy.
We already supply 100% renewable energy to nearly 2 million homes and over 15,000 businesses (including
Arsenal FC and the
Cardiff Blues to help them power their stadiums with 100% renewable energy) throughout Great Britain and we’re also the supplier behind
M&S Energy. We’re award winning for our
disruptive technology and are delighted to be the only energy supplier to pass the rigorous Which? customer service tests and be their only
recommended energy supplier for 4 years in a row.
We also proudly enjoy a
5-star TrustPilot ranking from our customers. We were named the Company that’s done the most in the past year to advance UK renewables at the
REA Awards 2019, and most recently, our proudest award, that of
Best Company to Work For. Our group includes Octopus Energy, Octopus for Business, Kraken Technology, Octopus Electric Vehicles and Octopus Energy Services as well as our new net zero Centre -
Octopus Centre for Net Zero.
We recently secured over £500 million of investment from
Origin, Australia's largest Energy Company and
Tokyo Gas, to help us continue on our mission.
Our team
All technology is written and maintained by a multi-discipline engineering team of around fifty people. This includes server-side, client-side and mobile engineers working closely with UX experts, copywriters and designers.
We follow a Kanban-like approach, using Google docs and Asana to specify and manage work; Github, CircleCI and Terraform Enterprise as part of an immutable-infrastructure, continuous delivery pipeline; and Loggly, Sentry and Cloudwatch to measure performance and monitor production.
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, monthly blitz-days (eg sharpening our internal tools, upgrading dependencies) and can often be found at tech meet-ups and conferences.
Octopus is a great place to learn, work with some talented engineers and level-up your skills.
Our technology
On the server-side, we mainly use Python. Most of our websites are powered by Django and the Django-REST-framework. We also use Pandas, Numpy and Jupyter for analysis and forecasting, plus Celery, RabbitMQ, SQS and Airflow for background processing.
We use AWS heavily, employing most of the "Hashistack" (eg Packer, Consul, Terraform) as part of a continuous deployment pipeline. See, for example, Django, ELB health checks and continuous delivery.
Client-side, we use React, Redux and SASS; our mobile apps are built using React Native.
What you'll do
We have lots of difficult design challenges to solve. The Japanese energy market is complicated, outdated and process-heavy - there's an awful lot of domain modelling that we need to get right. Strong attention to detail is essential.
We have difficult technical problems to solve. With the advent of smart meters, we'll soon be processing millions of meter readings a day. We need the right technology in place to handle this smoothly as well as feeding data into a machine learning pipeline that models and predicts consumption.
There's a great opportunity for disruption in the Japanese energy market. The energy landscape is changing as we move to more dis-aggregated forms of generation, with less predictability, more dynamism and smarter technology. Octopus Energy were the first UK supplier to introduce a "tracker" tariff whose prices track the daily wholesale prices: Please check here.
You'll be working for a company that’s fighting climate change. Our parent company is the largest investor in solar generation in the UK, and are funding wind and anaerobic digestion. As a supplier, we're helping people to use greener technology and renewable energy, all helping move the UK towards a lower carbon future.
What you'll have
We're looking for someone with a general interest in technology and problem-solving; someone diligent and thoughtful. It would be helpful to have experience/expertise in the following (in rough priority order):
Python
Django (or equiv. web framework)
Domain modelling
HTTP and REST APIs
Writing robust and fault-tolerant software
Celery and async processing
Postgres
Plus experience in the following would be a bonus:
AWS
Terraform, Packer, Consul
React and Redux
Ability to speak Japanese would be a plus
☰
