Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Magic Ink)

London, UK
Kraken Technologies UK 🦑 – Software Engineering /
Full-time /
Hybrid
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.

Help us make a big green dent in the universe. We're on a mission to drive the global renewable energy revolution, and we need loads more people to help us make our vision a reality.

About Octopus
Since 2015, Octopus has been on a mission to bring affordable, green energy to the world. With the help of our in-house developed technology platform, Kraken, we’ve become the 4th largest energy supplier in the UK, opened retailers in 5 other countries, and licensed our software to retail giants including E.ON in the UK and Origin Energy in Australia. We’ve reinvented energy products with smart, data driven tariffs to balance customer demand with renewable generation - and we’re the biggest investor in renewable generation in the UK. Our platform, Kraken, allows our energy specialists to be the most productive in the industry, and we’re looking for someone to join our ML team to use cutting edge technology to make it even better.

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.

We're looking for someone with the below qualities..

    • 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 below 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..

    • AWS cloud infrastructure
    • Databricks Delta Lake for data lake and warehouse storage and querying
    • dbt 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 collaborationAirflow 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 for this role is? Just ask us! On a call with one of our recruiters it's something we always cover as we genuinely want to match your experience with the correct salary. The reason why we don't advertise is because we honestly 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 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! We won best company to work for in 2022, on Glassdoor we we're voted 50 best places to work in 2022 and our Group CEO, Greg has recorded a podcast about our culture and how we empower our people 
    • Visit our perks hub - Octopus Employee Benefits
We would prefer someone who can work in our London office but will consider remote candidates. However, you do need to be able to work in the UK.

We're very excited to be growing our team. We're looking for skills and experience to help shape and define the future of not only our team, but the wider business at a global scale. If you're reading this and grinning, please apply! There are huge challenges to tackle, and we need amazing people who are keen to get stuck in.


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.