Technical Lead

Kaluza; West of England; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

26 days holiday

Private medical insurance

Pension scheme

Discretionary bonus

Flex Fund 5% of salary

Home office budget

Job summary

Kaluza is seeking a Technical Lead in Bristol (hybrid, three days in the office). You will own end-to-end technical delivery for a slice of the product, guiding architecture, and working with AI coding agents by default.

The role sits in the Engineering team reporting to the Software Engineering Manager and requires an existing UK right to work. You will drive technical strategy, collaborate across teams, and ensure production readiness with SLOs and post-mortems, while coaching engineers and

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical change from idea to production.
• Strong product sense and ability to align engineering with business goals.
• Proven ability to communicate clearly in writing and with stakeholders.
• Experience with modern web stack (TypeScript/React) and data/streaming tech (GraphQL, Kafka).
• Comfort with SRE concepts: SLOs, reliability, and on-call ownership.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for your team and guide architecture decisions.
• Work across the stack including interfaces, services, and APIs as needed.
• Build with AI coding agents as the default and review agent-generated code.
• Own the health of services: SLOs, post-mortems, on-call rotations.
• Coach engineers, mentor junior colleagues, and conduct code reviews.
• Collaborate with other Tech Leads and Principal Engineers on platform standards.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Problem solving

Strategic thinking

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

TypeScript

React

GraphQL

Kafka

AWS

Terraform

Job description

Technical Lead

Location: Bristol (hybrid, three days a week in the office)

Team: Engineering

Contract: Permanent

Reporting To: Software Engineering Manager

Please note: This role requires an existing right to work in the UK. We can’t offer visa sponsorship, but we review sponsorship role by role, so keep an eye on our careers site for future opportunities.

About Kaluza

Kaluza is the Energy Intelligence Platform, turning energy complexity into seamless coordination. We help energy companies overcome today’s challenges while accelerating the shift to a clean, electrified future.

Our platform orchestrates millions of real-time decisions across homes, devices, markets and grids. By combining predictive algorithms with human-centred design, Kaluza makes clean energy dependable, affordable and adaptive to everyday life.

With teams across Europe, Asia and Australia, and a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan, we power leading companies including OVO, AGL and ENGIE, as well as innovators like Volvo and Volkswagen.

The role

You’ll join the Kaluza Technology community: a large team of product-focused and data-led Product and Platform Engineers working at serious scale. Our ecosystem is primarily based on TypeScript and React, utilising GraphQL and Kafka, backed by AWS and Terraform. Our work and responsibilities are diverse and wide-ranging, so you will need to have a product-minded problem solving attitude first and foremost. As a Senior Engineer you’ll own a slice of the product end-to-end, from the first design conversation to running it in production, and you’ll build it with AI coding agents as your default. We’re looking for someone whose judgement is worth more than their typing speed.

Engineers at Kaluza build with AI, and we mean that practically. From your first day you’ll have paid access to Claude Code, with a budget we don’t ration, and MCP access to the systems you need. Our tooling and conventions are evolving quickly, and you’ll have a heavy hand in defining how we build moving forward.

What you’ll do

• Set the technical direction for your team: be accountable for the solution designs and architecture decisions, work with your team on technical strategy, and assist them through ambiguity over the longer term.

• Work across the stack over time: depending on the team you’ll work across the interface people use, the services behind it, and the APIs between them, in whatever stack your team runs.

• Build with AI coding agents as your default: break work down so agents can execute it, direct them, review what they produce as carefully as a colleague’s PR, and maintain the tests and guardrails that let agent-written code merge safely.

• Own the health of your services: SLOs and SLAs, operational health reviews, post-mortems, and the in-hours support rota, with your turn on the on-call rota alongside the team.

• Coach the engineers around you: technical guidance for a mix of junior and senior engineers, pairing, and code review that teaches as well as gates.

• Connect your team to the rest of Kaluza: work with other Tech Leads and Principal Engineers on the wider architecture, and represent your team where platform decisions and engineering standards are made.

What you’ll bring

These are the practices and behaviours we see most in our best tech leads and value deeply, but we don’t expect everyone to tick every single box. If you’re excited by the role and can see yourself thriving here, we’d love to hear from you.

Ideally, you’ll have:

• Experience with our tech stack: TypeScript and React, utilising GraphQL and Kafka, backed by AWS and Terraform.

• Experience leading technical change: you’ve taken a new service or a major architecture change from idea through to running in production, and you can say what you’d do differently.

• A daily agentic development practice: you build with tools like Claude Code or Cursor, you can walk us through work you’ve shipped this way, and you have views on where agents help a team and where they get in the way.

• Operational ownership: comfortable deploying with shared tooling, well-versed in SRE fundamentals like SLOs, disaster recovery and platform health monitoring, and used to owning your software in production, including out-of-hours on-call.

• A coach’s instincts: you’ve mentored and grown engineers at different levels, and you make the people around you better.

• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias to action: you can deliver against a technical strategy iteratively over months, and you’d rather ship a sound first step than wait for certainty.

• Strong product sense: you ask why before building, and you can point to times when user feedback or metrics changed what you shipped.

• Clear communication, especially in writing: designs, specs, PR descriptions and post-mortems that a teammate, a stakeholder or an agent can act on, and the stakeholder skills to work well with Product Managers, Principal Engineers and other Tech Leads.

Our Values

Five values guide how we work at Kaluza:

• Play to win: Collective pride in decarbonising energy at scale.

• Solve the real problem: Cutting through complexity to focus on real-world outcomes.

• Build trust every day: Consistency, transparency and doing what we say.

• Own the outcome: Full accountability, wins and setbacks, without ego.

• Go further together: Collaboration, respect and different perspectives.

Our Perks

• Time off and family: 26 days’ holiday, plus 26 weeks’ full pay for new parents with no qualifying service period

• Health and security: Private medical insurance with virtual GP, life assurance, pension scheme, free mortgage advice and eye tests

• Pay and flexibility: Discretionary bonus, a Flex Fund of 5% [of salary] to spend on the benefits you want most, retail discounts through Perks at Work

• Growth and setup: Personal learning budget, home office budget

• Climate: Furthr, our climate action app

Come as you are

We want to meet people from all walks of life. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be, and we recognise talent on merit and potential. If you’re excited about the role but don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you.

Find out more on our careers page and LinkedIn. Our Applicant Data Protection Policy is here.