Machine Learning Engineer

Help us use technology to make a big green dent in the universe!

Kraken powers some of the most innovative global developments in energy.

We’re a technology company focused on creating a smart, sustainable energy system. From optimising renewable generation, creating a more intelligent grid and enabling utilities to provide excellent customer experiences, our operating system for energy is transforming the industry around the world in a way that benefits everyone.

It’s a really exciting time in energy. Help us make a real impact on shaping a better, more sustainable future.

Kraken Customer

What we do: build the most AI-driven, innovative, forward-thinking platform for energy management. From optimizing resources to delivering cost-effective, exceptional customer experiences through advanced Customer Information Systems (CIS), billing, meter data management, CRM, and AI-driven communications, Kraken is powering the next wave of innovation in the energy industry.

Why we do it: future energy will not look like energy as we know it today. We need to not just think about our future, but build for it. Now.

About the team

Kraken is at the heart of Octopus' success, allowing individual agents to be experts in any problem a customer has by handling the whole customer lifecycle, and this wide remit presents a powerful opportunity for the ML team to work to optimise the platform. We make sure that Kraken provides the right data to continually learn & improve. We use state of the art NLP to analyse customer messages, suggest actions and help to generate responses. We crunch billions of data points to train ML models to forecast each customer’s usage. We do it by hiring clever, curious, and self-driven people, enabling them with modern tools and infrastructure and giving them lots of autonomy. Our ML team consists of data scientists and front-end and back-end engineers, so that we can rapidly prototype and get innovative features in use in the platform at breakneck speed.

About the role

With the rapid progress in language modelling over the last year, we’re working hard to make sure that we leverage this new technology to bring better service to customers. You’ll join our global ML/AI team, and focus on bringing this next generation of AI-powered features to Kraken. You’ll work across the whole product lifecycle: identifying uses of new technologies via exploration, working closely with operations teams to validate that your ideas will bring value, implementing them in collaboration with front and backend engineers, and creating systems to monitor their ongoing performance.

You’ll use state of the art LLMs and prompting techniques to create features, train models in-house where appropriate, and stay up to date with changes in the field. You’ll use Python and Kubernetes to deploy models via API, and you’ll use MLflow to manage trained models.

What you’ll need

• You don’t need prior energy supplier experience (we can teach you that).
• Passionate about working in energy and contributing to the energy transition
• Curious and self driven - in a field that changes so quickly, its essential you have the initiative to make decisions yourself, and can find solutions to novel problems without lots of help and support
• Learns fast and is enthusiastic about learning new technologies
• A passion for LLMs and the growing ecosystem around them, and hands-on experience with using them in production
• Experience with machine learning, and deploying models in production
• Has an engineering mindset - passionate about building robust tools, and has experience with some of the following technologies: Python, ML python packages like pytorch, huggingface and scitkit-learn, NLP, Kubernetes, SQL to prepare datasets for training and performance tracking

Our Data Stack

• We run a modern cloud data platform made up of the below components:
• AWS cloud infrastructure
• Databricks
• Delta Lake for data lake and warehouse storage and queryingdbt for data modelling and transformations
• Spark for large data processing
• Python data ecosystem as main scripting and analytics language
• Jupyter and Jupyter Hub for notebook analytics and collaboration
• Airflow for task scheduling
• Kubernetes for data services and task orchestration
• MLflow for experiment and model management
• Github, Circle CI, Grafana and Prometheus for version control, deployment and monitoring
• Tableau and Streamlit as data front ends

Why else you’ll love it here

• Wondering what the salary is for this position? Ask us! During our initial contact, this is something we always bring up, because we really want to match your experience with the right salary. The reason we don’t talk about it here is that we have a degree of flexibility and would never want salary to be a reason why someone doesn’t apply to Octopus - what’s more important to us is finding the right octofit!

• Octopus Energy has a unique culture: we won the award for Best Company to Work For in 2022, on Glassdoor UK we were voted one of the 50 Best Places to Work in 2022 and our CEO, Greg, recorded a podcast about our culture and how we empower our employees. In 2023, we were named one of the 100 best companies to work for in the Sunday Times. In France, we were awarded the Happy at Work label, and ranked eighteenth out of a total of 1,675 structures in the category of companies where employees find the most meaning.

• We are an organization where people learn, decide and build faster. Where they work autonomously, with extraordinary people, on innovative projects. Profit-sharing, flex-office, excellent mutual insurance, soft mobility package, coverage of part of the “pass navigo” above the legal minimum, and even special days off to invest in an associative project that’s close to your heart… we want your investment to be rewarded by benefits you really care about!

At Octopus, we’re looking for people who are genuinely caring and empathetic. Equal opportunities are important to us, and we’re committed to providing an inclusive and fair working environment. We invite you to apply, whatever your age, gender, marital status, color, disability, pregnancy or parenthood, origin, religious beliefs or sexual orientation.

If this sounds like you then we’d love to hear from you.

Are you ready for a career with us? We want to ensure you have all the tools and environment you need to unleash your potential. Need any specific accommodations? Whether you require specific accommodations or have a unique preference, let us know, and we’ll do what we can to customise your interview process for comfort and maximum magic!

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. Across Octopus, we’re looking for genuinely decent people who are honest and empathetic. Our people are our strongest asset and the unique skills and perspectives people bring to the team are the driving force of our success. 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.