Data Engineer (Tech Lead/Staff)

At Octopus Electric Vehicles we’ve built a data platform that provides data services to all areas of our business. The aim of the platform is to enable self-service of data analytics to data hungry internal users as well as automation of all our data workflows - from simple ETL jobs to ML training and prediction. The data team at OEV is growing at speed. We have invested time and resources on establishing a core data platform, and are now leveraging technology to automate processes and reporting, so we can focus on improving how our data platform works as a system - from improving data latency and reliability, to thinking about making our data ready for productionised data science applications.

We are looking for a data engineer who has operated at Staff/Tech Lead level that is equally passionate about using technology to grow the business and decarbonise the UK’s fleet. This is a fantastic opportunity to work on data problems that genuinely move us closer to Net Zero with a company that is passionate about building great technology to change the way customers travel sustainably.

What you'll do:

• Own and optimise our platform architecture (improve reliability, scalability, maintainability, etc).
• Shape the direction of our growing team and coach team members on best practices.
• Shape engineering outputs and raise the technical bar of the organization without losing touch with hands-on engineering.
• Interact with Senior Leadership to present your data projects back to them.
• Build new data sources and data pipelines that deliver key data and insights to the business (this will include integration with third party systems and ingestion through APIs).
• Scope and deliver new data engineering projects in collaboration with business stakeholders.
• Develop and deploy ML infrastructure to help build out our ever-growing AI requirements and use cases.
• Collaborate closely with our dev teams to build seamless integrations between our back-end databases and our data platform.

What you'll have:

• You don’t need experience with electric vehicles (we can teach you that!), but having worked in similar environments might be a bonus.
• First and foremost, a passion for decarbonisation.
• Ability to work with ambiguity and own problems end-to-end.
• Experience managing/mentoring/coaching high performance data teams.
• A passion for writing high quality code and building lean processes.
• Experience with distributed data processing.
• Experience with monitoring, testing, and data quality.
• Experience building robust pipelines from diverse sources e.g. parquet, SQL & no-SQL databases, API endpoints.

It would be helpful to have experience/expertise/knowledge in the following:

• Python
• AWS
• Kubernetes
• Spark & distributed computing
• dbt
• Terraform
• Data Warehousing (we use Databricks but experience with other platforms is fine)
• MLOps implementation (desirable but not required)
• Airflow (or other orchestration tooling)
• Governance

Why else you'll love it here:

Octopus Energy Group is a unique culture. An organisation where people learn, decide, and build quicker. Where people work with autonomy, alongside a wide range of amazing co-owners, on projects that break new ground. We want your hard work to be rewarded with perks you actually care about!

Octopus Electric Vehicles, part of the Octopus Energy Group, won the Sunday Times best company to work for in 2024. We were named 6th out of the top 100 start-ups to work for by Tempo in 2025 and on Glassdoor we were voted 50 best places to work in 2022.

Our Group CEO, Greg has recorded a podcast about our culture and how we empower our people. We’ve also been placed in the top 10 companies for senior leadership.

Things to note:

We are a dog friendly company so you may see our 4 legged friends in the offices - feel free to bring yours! Rest assured though, we've taken lots of precautions for those who have allergies.

We use AI to help us assess applications fairly and objectively. We’re totally fine with you using AI as a tool to help prepare too. That said, when we get to the interview and assessment stage, we’re really interested in hearing your unique perspective and real-world stories.

Studies have shown that some groups of people, like women, are less likely to apply to a role unless they meet 100% of the job requirements. Whoever you are, if you like one of our jobs, we encourage you to apply as you might just be the candidate we hire.

As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute. Our commitment is to provide equal opportunities, an inclusive work environment, and fairness for everyone.