Staff Frontend Engineer

About Piclo

The climate crisis means that now, more than ever, we need to act. Here at Piclo, we believe we are not powerless against climate change and are focused on enabling the transition to a decarbonised future. Our team is on a mission to make our energy systems smart, flexible and sustainable.

Who we are looking for

We’re hiring a Staff Frontend Engineer to join our Marketplace team, working alongside our friendly team of software engineers, product managers, designers and more that are at the forefront of transforming the energy sector.

About the team

The Marketplace team is a cross-functional team consisting of a product manager, designers and full-stack engineers. The team is at the forefront of transforming how Flexibility Service Providers (FSPs, our largest user group) buy, sell and deliver energy services, accelerating decarbonisation of the world’s electricity grids. See piclo.energy/max to learn more about what we do for FSPs.

The team works in agile iterations, with all team members contributing to prioritisation, discovery, design, scoping, delivery, and release evaluation. Most team members are based in London and work in the office together several times each month.

This team is one of several cross-functional teams in our Production department. Learn more about us at piclo.energy/about.

About the role

As a Staff Frontend Engineer in the Marketplace team, you will be a hands-on frontend specialist, producing an outsized impact on users’ love of our product and the value they gain from it. You will play a leading role in developing innovative user interfaces for our users, you will collaborate across the business, and will drive improvements across the Production department in how we leverage and develop for the web platform.

Your frontend development responsibilities will include:

• Developing and improving user-facing features using agile and iterative approaches, to modern UI and UX standards and simplicity
• Collaborating with your team and others at Piclo to identify and leverage opportunities to make effective use of the web platform to fulfil user and business needs
• Building upon and evolving Piclo’s design system and other shared components to enable consistency and reusability
• Optimising user experiences for performance, usability and scalability
• Ensuring our frontend systems protect Piclo and its users’ security and privacy
• Improving and evolve tools and systems for building, testing, deploying and monitoring frontend services

Your technical leadership responsibilities will include:

• Leading frontend architectural planning and the development of our software and services
• Proactively identifying and introducing new concepts, strategies, and technologies that enhance our frontend capabilities
• Guiding and mentoring other engineers
• Participating in code reviews across the engineering team, to help the team produce high-quality, maintainable code and encourage knowledge sharing
• Identifying, tracking and managing key metrics for the effectiveness of our frontend systems and practices

While the role is primarily remote, you will be expected to attend our London office (near Liverpool Street station) in person periodically for face-to-face team meetings and collaboration, typically roughly once per month, or more if you prefer.

About our tech

Our frontend includes:

• A Vue & Nuxt app currently including around 30 pages, 400 components and 20 store modules
• Tailwind CSS
• Mapbox
• Storybook and Chromatic
• Static hosting on AWS CloudFront/S3

Our backend includes:

• AWS, using serverless components such as API Gateway, Step Functions and SNS
• Around 20 microservices hosted on AWS Lambda, most running Python/Django
• Postgres GIS databases
• Restful JSON APIs over HTTPS
• Integrations to 3rd party services and customers’ systems

And they’re supported by:

• CI/CD using GitHub Actions and Terraform
• End-to-end tests
• Extensive use of feature flags

Our tech is evolving, and none of it is sacred — you will play a part in shaping its future.

About you

• You have 8+ years experience building data-driven web applications, with a focus on modern frontend
• You empathise with users, and advocate for solutions which optimise for their needs and experience
• You are highly proficient in building complete user experiences for the web which adapt to browsers and devices, and are comfortable with both data handling and UI/interaction
• You have extensive knowledge across the frontend ecosystem: HTML and CSS features, browser APIs, frameworks, build and deployment tools, testing libraries, best practices, learning resources, and more
• You have a good understanding of security, performance, usability and accessibility risks on the web and have experience mitigating, measuring, debugging and remedying them
• You strongly identify with Piclo’s values: to be human, collaborate, keep things simple, be adaptable, be open, and push boundaries
• You’re excited by Piclo’s mission to decarbonise the world’s electricity grids, by making them smarter, flexible and more sustainable

Our ideal candidate would also have:

• Extensive recent experience with and knowledge of the Vue ecosystem
• A track record of identifying and leading technical change initiatives through to completion
• An appreciation of backend technology, maybe even experience with Python and Django
• Experience working highly iteratively and applying ‘fixed time, variable scope’ techniques
• Experience mentoring other engineers

What we can offer 

• £85-95k, with discretionary bonus and the ability to participate in the success of the company through its share option scheme
• 25 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays)
• 35 hour week - with flexible working hours (within core business hours)
• Hybrid working - with occasional team days in our London office
• Life Assurance, Income Protection and private Healthcare with Vitality (medical history disregarded)
• A super welcoming, supportive, collaborative and transparent culture

Who we are

Piclo’s mission is to decarbonise the grid.  We are an independent marketplace for Distributed Energy Resources (DER).  Our software solutions help these batteries, electric vehicles, homes and offices to sell their flexibility to electricity grid operators.  And we help these grid and system operators create new markets through which to buy that flexibility. 

To date, Piclo has over 300,000 registered flexible assets representing 22 GW of registered flex capacity, with flexibility contracts awarded totalling £74m and 2.6 GW+ of flexible capacity procured.

Piclo currently operates globally, with current markets in the UK, Europe (Ireland,  Italy, Portugal), the United States, and Australia - with ambitions to expand further.

We know “flexibility” can be quite complex to understand at first, here’s a short video that explains “what are flexibility services?”

Inclusivity

Our team welcomes everyone to work together on our mission. We are all in this together after all. We don’t believe that anyone should be discriminated against for any reason, be that age, nationality, gender, race, sexual preferences, religious beliefs, political leanings or disabilities. We welcome diversity among our colleagues and see it as important that everyone is supported and comfortable working with us. Piclo is expanding internationally, so English doesn’t have to be your first language, but we would like you to be fluent.

How to apply and interview process

Click the Apply button and tell us about your skills and experience, and why you think you’d be a good fit for this role. 

Please include either a copy of your CV, the URLs for any personal site or Linkedin profile, as well as URLs to any relevant public repositories that might support your application. Please note that, at this stage, we’re more interested in hearing why you think you’re a good match for us and the role. 

We conduct interviews in three stages

1. Introductory call: we’ll invite you for a short video call to discuss your experience and what you’re looking for in your next role. 
2. Challenge: If successful, applicants will be invited to complete a challenge relevant to the skills required in your role
3. Final interview: if successful, applicants will then be invited to a final, in-depth interview and collaboration session to meet additional members of the team.

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