Backend Engineer in City of London, London

Company Overview

AI is driving data center power consumption to more than double, from ~460 TWh today to a projected 1,000 TWh by 2030, roughly the electricity consumption of Japan! Hyperscalers and AI companies are racing to secure compute capacity, while new grid connections in key markets are queued years out. Meanwhile, capacity sits stranded in existing infrastructure, managed through outdated models that were never built to handle the power-dense workloads coming rapidly down the pike. At Zendo we're developing the operating layer that enables operators to get more value from every watt. Our Energy OS platform brings together operational data, energy intelligence, and proprietary load forecasting across the data center power stack to help operators access more capacity, sooner.

We’ve been building at pace to match the urgency of the capacity crunch, with some great traction so far: Raised $2M in pre-seed funding from Fly Ventures, Pact, and Octopus Ventures, with angels from Google and across the data centre industry. Live with several UK data centre customers, with a pipeline to grow across the market. A founding team combining deep energy, B2B software, and data centre infrastructure expertise — ex-Octopus Energy, Square, Meta. This is an opportunity to join us on the ground floor, work directly with the founders, and grow with the business as we build Zendo into a true category leader on the frontlines of an industry undergoing the largest infrastructure build-out in history.

Your Role as Backend Engineer

You'll work directly with our Founding Engineer (ex-Meta infrastructure) and the founders on Zendo’s core platform - the systems that ingest and process real-time energy data, model capacity, and deliver commercial intelligence to operators. This is an early hire with real influence over architecture and technical direction.

Examples of what you'll be working on:

• Agentic customer onboarding — reducing the time and effort required to deploy Zendo for new data centre customers through automated, intelligent workflows.
• Data centre integrations — connecting to live data centre systems (BMS, meters, monitoring infrastructure) to bring operational data into the platform.
• Real-time data processing — building and maintaining the pipelines that ingest, normalise, and route high-frequency data inputs reliably across the platform.
• Multi-tenant capacity optimisation — orchestrating forecasting, simulation.
• Capacity availability signals — designing the architecture for surfacing real-time capacity data back out to users.

What We're Looking For

• 4–6 years of backend/systems engineering experience, with strong fundamentals in systems design and delivery.
• Strong propensity for managing ambiguity and quickly adapting to changes in system requirements, bottlenecks, and priorities.
• Cloud infrastructure management experience, working knowledge of Infrastructure as code, AWS, Docker, etc.
• Experience building and managing highly-available production workflows using Airflow or other related technologies.
• Strong communication skills — you'll work across technical and non-technical stakeholders regularly.

Nice to have:

• Experience in data centres, energy markets, or electrical or mechanical systems.
• Familiarity with agentic workflows, LangGraph, etc.
• Experience productionizing ML models and MIP or related solver technologies.
• Experience working in fast-paced delivery environments, proven experience building MVPs quickly and scaling later.

Beyond the CV:

• You thrive in a 0→1 environment and know the difference between building for now and building for scale.
• You take ownership end-to-end, from design to deployment, without waiting to be told what to do next.
• You're comfortable with fast iteration and changing requirements without losing sight of quality.
• You want to work on infrastructure that has real operational consequence — not just features for dashboards.
• You're energised by working on a small team where your decisions have immediate, visible impact.

What We're Offering

• A ground-floor, high-ownership role at a well-backed startup at one of the most exciting intersections in tech right now — AI compute and energy.
• Work directly with the founding team and a growing network of strategic advisors and investors.
• Access to a lovely co-working space in the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter.
• Quarterly team offsites and socials.
• Competitive salary & equity.

Location & Requirements

• Hybrid: We work 1–2 days/week from co-working spaces in London (King's Cross).
• Right to Work: You must have the legal right to work in the UK. We are unfortunately unable to sponsor visas at this time.

Ready to join the team? If you're excited about building the future of energy infrastructure for the AI era, we'd love to hear from you!