Principal Engineer

Our Story

Our mission is to bring people to an electrified, net-zero world. Our technology powered the UK’s fastest-growing company, and helped thousands of consumers manage their energy usage and decarbonise their homes.

We’re now working to open that technology up to retailers around the world so we can accelerate a consumer-led transition to an electrified grid and net zero economy. We will be the powerhouse behind the products that enable people to understand, manage and take control of their energy.

Your team

Working as part of our engineering organisation you will be responsible for designing and building a wide range of new products, services and tools to support the global energy transition. Consumers are always at the centre of our focus and their needs lead our product design. We are currently hiring within our Consumer and Platform Engineering streams. Within Consumer, you will be developing new features to help consumers to better understand and manage their energy usage. Our Platform teams create internal tools to help us scale faster.

You Will

• Use your expertise and experience to drive our technical direction and help teams to make significant architectural decisions

• Collaborate with Engineering Leaders to help define and evolve our ways of working, engineering principles and best practices

• Be a role model and provide support to engineers at all stages of their careers: Leading by example and helping to shape our engineering culture.

• Work closely with other Staff and Principal engineers to promote and drive cross-team initiatives that help to raise the bar across engineering

• Use data to guide product and engineering decisions to ensure we are focused on what matters most

• Be a hands-on individual contributor working across multiple teams and domains

• You will design and build key parts of our system, creating technical designs, writing code and reviewing pull requests to help solve our most complex problems

• You will support the long term health of our codebases by helping teams to identify, prioritise and manage technical debt

• You will have a curious mindset and be sought out by others to help debug and understand complex issues and respond to incidents

• You will work closely with senior leadership to understand the needs of the business and represent the needs of the engineering teams

• You will help to grow the team by attracting, hiring and onboarding Senior engineers and other specialised roles.

About You

Essential experience

• Proven experience building reliable, observable and maintainable software systems at scale with business impact

• Experience designing, analysing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems

• Good knowledge and experience of at least one Cloud Platform (AWS, GCP, Azure)

• 8+ years experience working with and strong foundations in one or more high-level programming languages (Javascript or Python)

• A strong understanding of different database technologies (e.g Postgres, BigQuery) and their relative tradeoffs and experience managing data at scale

• A strong practitioner of automated testing and understanding of different levels of the testing pyramid

• Good understanding of web-security best practices and knowledge of the tooling landscape

• Experience working on a microservices architecture involving both synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication

• Experience working within a SaaS company

• Experience working with a rapidly changing startup environment, helping to manage uncertainty and growing engineering teams from scratch

Desirable experience

• Familiarity with the tools and technologies used in our current stack:

  • Google Cloud Platform, including: GKE, Cloud PubSub, BigQuery

  • TypeScript, React, React Native

  • Terraform

  • Kubernetes, Helm and ArgoCD

  • Postgres

  • CircleCI and Docker

  • DataDog

  
  

Benefits

Competitive salary: £169,000 - £182,000
Share options giving you a stake in the company’s success
25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
Private healthcare and life assurance
A budget for learning & development to support your growth
Hybrid working: core hours and a flexible balance of office and home days

What’s next?

If your application is successful, you can expect the following recruitment journey:
1) Recruiter screen
2) Remote Hiring Manager interview
3) Onsite Final Interviews: typically 3 rounds

About Us

At Zoa, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. We believe that diversity of thought, background, and experience drives innovation and success. We are dedicated to building a team that represents a variety of perspectives and experiences, and we actively encourage applications from underrepresented groups. We are an equal opportunities employer, all applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.

If you're passionate about net zero technology and share our commitment to making a positive impact, we encourage you to apply for a role with us, even if you're not sure you're a perfect match. We look forward to hearing from you and discussing how you can contribute to our team. Apply now, or connect with us to learn more about our current opportunities.