Head of Engineering - Optimisation & Control

Jackalope Digital LLC; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

KrakenFlex is the flexibility arm of the Kraken group, built to optimise grid operations and accelerate the adoption of green energy.

As Head of Engineering, you will lead multi-squad engineering teams, maintain technical vision, shape platform architecture, and drive reliability and scalable delivery.

You will influence across product and leadership, mentor managers, and guide delivery while growing future leaders.

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering teams across multiple squads, teams or product areas in a complex product environment.
• Collaborative product and engineering mindset focused on outcomes, strategy, quality and people.

Responsibilities

• Manage the leads and maintain the technical vision for the area.
• Oversee the overall team architecture and ensure services are owned and maintained.
• Ensure scalable, cost-effective delivery aligned with the product area vision.
• Prioritise tech debt to support sustainable delivery and reduce incidents.
• Possibly manage a squad and coach future leaders.

Skills

Leadership experience

Product & engineering mindset

Stakeholder management

Ambiguity tolerance

People leadership

Job description

Help us use technology to make a big green dent in the universe!

Kraken powers some of the most innovative global developments in energy.

We create the technology that redefines utilities and unlocks a new energy system of the future. By optimising renewable generation, building a more intelligent grid, and empowering utilities to deliver an exceptional customer experience, our operating system is transforming the industry worldwide.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to work in energy. Join us on our mission to improve the lives of ONE BILLION humans within the decade and shape a cleaner, better future for everyone.

Where you'll fit in:

KrakenFlex is the flexibility arm of the Kraken group, built to put a big green dent in global carbon emissions by rewriting how electricity grids operate. We stabilize the grid and help renewables come online much faster by managing the second-by-second balance of clean power.

Right now, our platform connects nearly one million assets worldwide, putting over 6GW of live load under our direct control.

Behind the scenes, that means handling massive technical scale: solving complex optimization problems in real time and processing 15 billion data readings a day from the latest green technologies, ensuring the grid stays reliable without relying on old fossil-fuel backup plants.

The next phase of our journey involves monumental growth. Currently operational across multiple countries, we are poised for further global expansion, scaling our asset base and tackling unique grid challenges in new territories. Our mission is to integrate an increasingly diverse array of green flexibility assets while ensuring our market-leading platform remains exceptionally stable and performant.

What is Optimisation in Flex?

The Optimisation chapter is the mathematical and algorithmic engine of the KrakenFlex platform. While other chapters manage physical asset connectivity or ingest market signals, this domain is responsible for the intelligence that decides exactly what every asset should do, second by second, to maximise both grid stability and financial returns.

The teams within this chapter build and maintain the real-time dispatch engines, predictive forecasting models, and algorithmic solvers that handle massive multi-asset portfolios. This involves translating complex market rules, physical asset constraints (like battery degradation curves, state-of-charge limits, and ramp rates), and fluctuating price signals into optimised execution strategies.

The defining challenge for this chapter is scaling computational performance alongside our rapid asset growth. Running complex, multi-variable mathematical models in tight real-time windows requires immense efficiency. The core tension lies in balancing the demand from data science and quantitative engineering to introduce increasingly sophisticated models with the strict platform requirement for absolute reliability, low latency, and cost-effective cloud compute.

Ultimately, this chapter must move away from bespoke optimisation routines tailored to individual markets or asset types. Your goal is to architect a highly performant, modular optimisation core that uses standard abstract layers, allowing us to roll out new algorithms or expand into new global territories without rewriting the underlying engine.

What you’ll own:

The Flex platform is built on autonomous Chapters, which are collections of specialists focused on delivering a core service or business outcome, defined by the unchanging nature of the energy business (independent of technology, hardware, or regional differences). A Head of Engineering leading a Chapter is a senior leadership role combining strong product thinking, engineering judgement, operational awareness, and people leadership. They manage managers and senior individual contributors, helping teams own their product surfaces, make sound trade-offs, and deliver reliably.

This role requires influencing beyond its formal remit, spotting cross-team patterns, clarifying ownership and decision-making, and driving initiatives to turn recurring issues into visible actions with owners, dates, and measures of success. Ultimately, they maintain the technical vision for their specific area, ensuring services are appropriately owned, maintained, and aligned with Flex's sustainable growth.

• Managing the leads.
• Maintaining the technical vision for a given area.
• The overall team architecture
• Ensuring the services in that area are owned and maintained appropriately.
• Ensuring that product features are built in a way that scales, is cost-effective, and is in line with the vision for a product area.
• Ensuring the appropriate level of quality and resilience, with a specific focus on reducing system incidents and improving stability.
• Ensuring appropriate tech debt is prioritised to support sustainable delivery.
• Potentially managing a squad (team) as well.

What you’ll bring to the party:

You’ll be a strong fit if you have experience leading engineering teams across multiple squads, teams or product areas in a complex product environment.

• A collaborative product and engineering mindset: you care about customer outcomes, product strategy, technical quality and the people needed to make the work real.
• Strong judgement in ambiguity: you can separate urgent from important, make trade-offs explicit and help teams move without pretending all uncertainty has disappeared.
• A track record of influencing beyond your reporting line and team, building trust with senior stakeholders and helping teams reach decisions when ownership is shared.
• A bias for action and improvement: when you see a recurring issue, you turn it into the smallest useful action that starts making the system better.
• Reliability in driving initiatives: people can trust that when you take ownership, the work keeps moving, dependencies are managed and decisions are followed through.
• Strong people leadership practice, including coaching, direct feedback, performance management, delegation, psychological safety and development of future leaders.

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Please note that, in line with our current recruitment policy, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this position; applicants must have the right to work in the country that they're applying to, at the time of application.

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