Senior Engineer II - API Platform

Job title: Senior Engineer II - API Platform

Location: London, Bristol or Edinburgh (hybrid)

Part time available?: Yes

Salary: £78,000 - £108,500

Reports to: Software Engineering Manager

Position Type: Permanent

Closing Date: Wednesday 5th February 2025

Kaluza wants to power a world where net-zero is within everyone’s reach, by building the platform that will accelerate a sustainable, affordable and resilient energy transition. It’s a huge challenge, but often the toughest problems are the most rewarding to solve.

Since launching in 2019, Kaluza’s technology has been empowering some of the biggest energy suppliers to better serve millions of customers.

From revolutionising billing to smart electric vehicle charging, our real-time cloud platforms transform supplier operations, reducing cost to serve and boosting engagement. And most importantly, they enable suppliers' customers to drive decarbonisation with smart, low carbon technologies.

Where in the world of Kaluza will I be working? 

You'll be joining the Kaluza Technology community. We’re a diverse group of both data-led and product-focused engineers, pushing the boundaries of technology and working at an extraordinary scale. We strive for engineering quality & innovation, continuously improving our best practices across our highly collaborative community. 

The API Platform team is a team of 6 software engineers within the Client Integrations squad responsible for building & supporting the retail platform-critical components of Kaluza’s GraphQL API (KaPI) & event gateway (KEG) solutions. Our vision is that Kaluza is the easiest, most intuitive retail platform with which to integrate, providing a coherent, low latency way for retail clients to maintain and find their data. Kaluza is currently at the very beginning of a wider redesign of our technology estate which will create a lot of opportunities for us to improve how we integrate with other teams and the architecture of our services. This will allow us to  continue to scale our services as we continue to increase the number of customers and clients.

The team is well-distributed across the UK so we operate as a remote-first team, although we do organise physical meet-ups every 6-8 weeks in our London, Edinburgh or Bristol offices for workshops & fun.

Our services are currently built using Scala, GraphQL and DynamoDB, alongside Kafka & Avro. We deploy on to our internal Kubernetes platform with Terraform & Aiven as our IaC and GitHub for code repositories and workflows. We’re reviewing our core technology stack at the moment and it’s likely we’re going to move away from Scala & Kafka and focus more on the use of synchronous REST APIs with Typescript and another language to be confirmed.

What will I be doing?

As the Tech Lead for the API Platform team, you’ll play a crucial part in the strategic direction of our external API products by leading our team of engineers in solution design, technical innovation and ways of working whilst remaining ‘hands-on’ with the implementation of new features & technical improvements and supporting our production services.

• Collaborating with Tech Leads in other squads/teams to contribute to the wider system architecture
• Representing our team in wider discussions to support the adoption of our platforms by other teams
• Ensuring high quality solution designs and engineering standards within the team
• Responsible for ensuring our services meet the required SLO’s & SLAs
• Collaborating with the teams Software Engineering Manager and Product Manager to build an efficient flow of development work and build a high quality product.
• Supporting and coaching a mixture of junior and senior engineers
• Working on a mixture of discovery/spike tasks, tech debt and core delivery tickets on our backlog
• Providing in-hours support for KaPI and/or KEG as part of our team rota
• Playing an active part in our team’s progress reviews, daily stand-ups, operational health reviews, backlog refinement and retros

There will also be opportunities to…

• Join in on our squad’s innovation time (and/or Kaluza innovation time)
• Join our OOH rota
• Get involved in our team meet-ups & socials, and squad events (e.g. Coffee & Donuts sessions, in-office meet-ups)
• Pair or swarm on improving shared services/products
• Represent our team at squad or engineering community level (e.g. Platform health reviews, post-mortems, etc)

Is this the job for me?

We’re looking for someone who has a high level of technical skill & understanding and is also able to guide, support and coach a team of 6 engineers whilst ensuring we’re able to implement high quality solutions..  

It’s essential that you have:

• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers
• Strong stakeholder management skills working with Product managers Tech Leads, Principle engineers etc
• Experience in leading the design and implementation of new service design or significant architecture changes
• Backend  and/or full stack development experience
• Evidence of working with a breadth of tooling from CI/CD pipelines to Infrastructure As Code. 
• Awareness of core SRE concepts such as disaster recovery and platform health monitoring
• Evidence of proactively & independently solving problems, as well evidence showing your ability to pair on development or problem-solving tasks
• An enthusiasm to learn new technologies and about new domains by engaging with other teams and squads within the wider tech community
• An awareness of how to encourage a positive and constructive team culture
• An understanding of Agile ways of working and are able to champion improvements to team processes
• An appreciation for product and customer insights and how they can be used to improve our service and how we deliver improvements to them.

It would also be advantageous, but not essential, that you have some of:

• Experience with cross team and squad collaboration
• Experience with Scala 
• Experience  in the implementation of  SRE concepts such as disaster recovery and platform health monitoring
• Experience with building, deploying & monitoring AWS components
• Experience with Kubernetes hosted components
• Experience working with Kafka & Avro
• Experience working with DynamoDB

Kaluza Values

Here at Kaluza we have five core values that guide us as a business: 

We’re on a mission, We build together, We’re inclusive, We get it done, We communicate with purpose.

Our values are not words on a wall — they are at the heart of our culture. They are how we make decisions and how we treat each other. They are concrete and clear, and reflect what we as people, and as a business, really care about.

Kaluza’s vision is to power a world where net-zero is within everyone’s reach. Would you be interested in joining us to help achieve this?

From us you’ll get

• Pension Scheme
• Discretionary Bonus Scheme
• Private Medical Insurance + Virtual GP
• Life Assurance
• Access to Furthr - a Climate Action app
• Free Mortgage Advice and Eye Tests
• Perks at Work - access to thousands of retail discounts
• 5% Flex Fund to spend on the benefits you want most
• 26 days holiday

• Flexible bank holidays, giving you an additional 8 days which you can choose to take whenever you like

• Progressive leave policies with no qualifying service periods, including 26 weeks full pay if you have a new addition to your family 
• Dedicated personal learning and home office budgets
• Flexible working — we trust you to work in a way that suits your lifestyle
• And more…

Even better? You’ll have access to these benefits from day 1 when you join.

We want the best people

We’re keen to meet people from all walks of life — our view is that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We want to build teams which represent a variety of experiences, perspectives and skills, and we recognise talent on the basis of merit and potential.

We understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they tick every box. But if you're excited about joining us and think you have some of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure, we'd still love to hear from you.

Find out more about working in Kaluza on our careers page and LinkedIn.