Backend Engineer
Octopus Energy · London, England
About the Role
We're making energy fair, clean, and simple for all using technology.
Octopus Energy started with a bold idea: to build Britain’s first truly digital energy supplier. By combining world-class tech with brilliant humans who care deeply about customers and driving the renewable energy transition, we made it happen and in 2025, we became Britain’s largest energy supplier.
Octopus Energy Group is a global energy transition collective. 10 businesses working across 4 continents to tackle energy transformation at nearly every front.
And we constantly push to make energy better. Tirelessly campaigning for fair protections for customers. And building innovative technologies that forge a path to a green energy system.
We’re made up of 10,000+ authentic, committed people working around the world on stuff you'd never expect. We're united by a shared goal: to drive the global green energy revolution. Read our Spotlight series to meet some of the team.
We are looking for Backend Engineers (mid level) to join our Devices team and Low Carbon Tech team.
Devices: Since launching our first piece of hardware, Home Mini, in 2022, followed by Cosy Heat Pumps in 2023 and the Charge EV Charger in 2025, we have continued to expand our portfolio of devices, helping customers make the green energy transition.
You'll join a cross-functional team of backend and mobile engineers, working closely with our hardware team to extend and improve integrations for both existing and new devices in the Octopus Energy app. This includes the recently announced Nook family of home batteries, with more exciting products already in the pipeline. If you want to design and build solutions that scale low-carbon technology in homes across the UK, this is the mission for you.
Low Carbon Tech: Low Carbon Tech are installing EV Chargers, Solar, Batteries and Heat Pumps into homes to drive the energy transition at pace. As customer demand grows, our goal is to ensure scaling up never means slowing down or compromising on a world-class customer journey for low carbon tech.
To make that happen, we are building a new, dedicated engineering and product team to completely re-imagine this process - making it fast, transparent, and predictable for our customers from day one. This will be a small multi-disciplinary team who’ll sit within our much bigger low carbon tech team.
You’ll help design and build the platform architecture, data integrations, and automations that eliminate real world friction. If you want to design and build solutions to scale up electrotech in the nation’s homes, this is the mission for you.
We embrace flat hierarchies and an open, agile culture that fosters innovation, flexibility, and creativity.
We don’t hang our personalities up with our coats and nor should you. At Octopus, we hire great people who get stuff done, all whilst being themselves.
If this sounds exciting, we’d love to chat.
What you'll do
Take independent ownership of medium-sized technical features and components, delivering stable and production-ready code with minimal supervision
Ship continuously to trunk - small PRs, fast feedback, no release trains. You'll be working in a codebase with ~100 merges per week from dozens of contributors
Build and extend a Django backend serving multiple countries from a single codebase, making deliberate decisions about what should be generic vs. territory-specific
Integrate with upstream platform services (Kraken Customer, Kraken Field, Kraken Flex) that provide billing, CRM, auth, and device control - orchestrating across service boundaries daily
Proactively identify and address monitoring, alerting, and observability gaps within your applications to ensure live systems run predictably
Engage confidently in feature technical designs, participate actively in code reviews, and provide clear documentation for your pull requests
Use systematic, structured approaches to resolve bugs or service blockers, and confidently step in to address incident management within your core domain
What you'll need
Solid backend foundations with a 3-4 year track record building web applications in Python, ideally with Django. Experience writing highly testable code (unit, integration, and functional tests run in parallel in CI) and working with relational databases and background task processing
Comfortable working in a large, multi-tenant codebase - navigating and extending shared abstractions, territory-specific behaviour, and integrations with upstream services. The habit of asking "would this work for another territory?" before building something bespoke
Comfortable with pace over process - we ship continuously, not in sprints, and trust automated guardrails (type checking, linting, CI) over manual gates
Openness and excitement around integrating modern AI tools into daily development, testing, and debugging to maintain pace and spark innovation
High initiative - able to break down engineering problems into shippable slices and make steady progress when requirements are evolving or domain context is still being built
A genuine curiosity about smart energy devices and the technology that connects them to people's homes. You won't need hardware expertise, but you'll be building the software that makes these devices useful to customers
Coachable - genuinely interested in feedback and willing to adapt your approach
Our core tech stack...
Python, Django
PostgreSQL, Celery, and asynchronous background processing
API architectures: GraphQL, REST, HTTP
Domain modelling, writing fault-tolerant systems, and test-driven development (TDD)
Also valuable…
TypeScript, AWS Lambda, CDK
DynamoDB, event-driven microservices, API Gateway
Distributed architecture and scaling across services
Why else you'll love it here
Share this role
Get the weekly green briefing
No noise. Just insights.