Staff Engineer

So Energy; London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

So Energy is seeking a dynamic Staff Engineer for our innovative Nova platform. This role encompasses backend architecture, AI enhancements, and mentorship, aimed at propelling our mission for sustainable energy solutions. Join a forward-thinking team dedicated to technical excellence and environmental sustainability in the energy sector.

Benefits

Personalised Learning and Development Budget

Hybrid working hours

Technology – Your choice of Mac or Windows

1 Birthday day off

3 So Giving Days

Religious Celebrations Leave

Mental Healthcare Sessions with Unmind

Enhanced Family Leave

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and building large-scale backend systems.
• Expertise in cloud-native development is essential.
• Strong familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve scalable backend systems for the Nova platform.
• Lead best practices in software development and DevOps.
• Drive AI tools adoption to enhance engineering workflows.

Skills

Architecture Design

Backend Engineering

AI Integration

Cloud Development

Observability

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Datadog

Grafana

GitHub Actions

Job description

Our priority is to match the right person to the right role, and we never want salary to be a barrier to applying. Regardless of your current pay, we’ll ask about your salary expectations during the application process, and our Talent Team will have an open, honest conversation during the screening call to understand your skills and explore our salary options. If you have questions around salary, please feel free to ask us!

London, Hybrid

️ Our Perks

• Personalised Learning and Development Budget
• Hybrid working hours – Each team has their own Smart Working Charter that empowers you to do your work in the best way you can
• Technology – Your choice of Mac or Windows
• 1 Birthday day – it only happens once a year!
• 3 So Giving Days - spend these days giving back to your chosen cause
• Religious Celebrations Leave
• Mental Healthcare – Sessions withUnmind
• Enhanced Family Leave

So Energy

Who we are

So Energy was created in 2015 because we knew energy suppliers could be better. Since then, we’ve grown rapidly but sustainably, with 300,000 customers and over 450 Energists (what we call our people). But we’re not done. We’re on the road to a net zero future, and thanks to our partnership with ESB, we’re well on the way. We’re customer-centric, tech-led, and passionate about sustainability.

We want to do the best we can for our customers, each other, and our planet, so we’ve created a workplace that's encouraging, supportive, and offers the opportunity for growth. As a company, we live by six core values that guide everything we do:

• Clear
• Honest
• Ambitious
• Inquisitive
• Caring
• Sustainable

The Role

Staff Engineer at SO ENERGY

At So Energy, we’re on a mission to build a better energy company. As Staff Engineer for our Nova platform, you will serve as the technical cornerstone of one of our most strategic products, driving technical excellence, whole system optimisation, and sustainable innovation. This role isn’t just about writing code (though you’ll do that too); it’s about setting technical direction, being an active doer, exploring the frontier of AI-enabled productivity, and elevating the entire engineering craft.

You will play a crucial role in helping us move faster, accelerating delivery, simplifying complex systems, and enabling our teams to ship higher quality features with greater speed and confidence. You’ll balance deep backend mastery with full-stack fluency, possess a firm grasp of infrastructure, and be comfortable engaging with frontend technologies. You will explore how AI, automation, and the latest developer tools can 10x our engineering output and help us stay ahead of industry trends, all while supporting our sustainability mission.

What you’ll be getting up to:

• Architect, design and evolve scalable, performant, low-maintenance backend systems that power the Nova platform.
• Optimise for resilience, observability, security, and cost efficiency across all layers of the system.
• Be an active agent of change, constantly identifying opportunities to simplify, consolidate, and modernise our technical landscape.
• Lead the evaluation, introduction, and adoption of emerging AI coding tools, frameworks, and productivity enhancers.
• Drive best practices across software development, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps, balancing tactical fixes with strategic improvements.
• Actively contribute to architecture reviews, RFCs, design sessions, and engineering standards.

Collaboration, Mentorship & Culture

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data, and Operations teams to shape technical solutions aligned with business outcomes.
• Serve as a mentor, coach, and multiplier for engineers across multiple teams.
• Help build a strong technical community at So Energy, fostering learning, innovation, and knowledge-sharing.
• Support talent development by assisting with hiring, onboarding, and long-term career growth.
• Represent So Energy externally as a thought leader in AI-powered software engineering.

AI Exploration & Innovation

• Explore, prototype, and implement AI-driven tools and workflows to increase software delivery velocity and code quality.
• Continuously research how Large Language Models (LLMs), code generation, intelligent monitoring, and AI-assisted debugging can be applied across engineering disciplines.
• Drive adoption of AI copilots, smart code review assistants, and AI-powered testing frameworks.
• Keep So Energy at the forefront of responsible AI adoption in technical delivery.

Full Stack Practitioner & Infrastructure Fluent

• While backend will be your deep specialty, you’ll have the skills to engage meaningfully across the stack:
• Frontend conversations: Vue.js, modern component-driven design, API design for seamless integration.
• Infrastructure: GCP stack, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, SonarCloud), observability (Datadog, Grafana).
• Data: BigQuery, SQL/NoSQL, event-driven architecture, data pipelines.
• Bring holistic thinking to system design, including scalability, latency, operational excellence, and future-proofing.

This role will be a great fit if:

Core Competencies

• Expertise in backend architecture; informed practitioner across frontend, infrastructure, and data.
• Proven or demonstrated capability to apply AI/ML technologies to software engineering workflows.
• Ability to influence architectural direction and technical strategy across multiple squads.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, breaking down complex technical problems into actionable solutions.
• Driven to continuously simplify, consolidate, and improve entire systems and workflows.
• Passion for sustainable energy and for making engineering a force multiplier for our business and planet.
  

Skills & Experience

• Significant experience designing and building large-scale backend systems (Kotlin/Java must; Python, Scala, or others also valued).
• Deep understanding of domain driven design systems, modular monoliths, distributed systems, microservices, API design, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with cloud-native development (GCP preferred; AWS experience relevant).
• Infrastructure-as-code expertise: Terraform, Kubernetes.
• Database mastery: PostgreSQL, BigQuery, NoSQL.
• Observability and monitoring: Datadog, Grafana, logging pipelines.
• Security best practices: OAuth, SSO, data protection, and secure coding principles.
• Familiarity with frontend frameworks (React, Vue) and mobile technologies (Ionic, Swift, Android) a plus.
• Hands-on experience using or trialling AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code etc.) a strong differentiator.

Research shows that some people are less likely to apply for a role unless they are 100% qualified. Your experience, skills and passion will set you apart so tell us about your achievements, irrespective of whether they are personal or work-related, tell us about your journey, and about what you learnt.

So, if this role excites you, don’t let our role description hold you back, get applying!

APPLICATIONS CLOSE ON 06/07/2025

Hiring Process

1. Talent Screening - Member of Talent Team
2. Hiring Manager Interview - Engineering Manager
3. Technical Interview
4. Cultural Fit Interview

Support – If you have a medical condition or an individual need for an adjustment to our process, and you believe this may affect your ability to be at your best – please let us know so we can talk about how we can best support you and make any adjustments that may be needed.

Our Values

We look for people who share our values and can add to our culture. Values are shared beliefs that guide our decision-making, culture is how we function as a group and how we live our values as individuals.

Clear - The energy industry can be pretty complex so we strive to provide clear communication to our customers and colleagues

Honest - Transparency is key, Whether that's providing clear bills to our customers or trusting our staff to do the right thing.

Ambitious - All of us are ambitious about the future of So Energy and what we can contribute to it.

Inquisitive - We are also questioning the Status Quo to see if there is a better way to do things for our customers

Caring - We care about the work we are doing, our customers and our colleagues
Sustainable - As a renewable energy company we are providing sustainable products but we also care about sustainable careers. That's why learning and continuous development is so important to us.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging

At So Energy, we’re committed to cultivating an environment that promotes diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. We are a global community and we believe our unique qualities should be celebrated as they are critical to our innovation. It’s essential to us that you bring your authentic self to work every single day, no matter your age, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, caring responsibilities, neurodiversity, or otherwise. Inclusion isn’t just an initiative at SoEnergy. We strive to embed it not just into our values but throughout our entire culture.