Machine Learning Engineer

We're making zero carbon happen

We’re OVO Group, a big family of companies united by a single vision: to get to zero carbon, fast. 

We call this Plan Zero – and it shows how we’ll be fighting the climate crisis and transforming the way people use energy over the next decade. To do this, we need the sharpest minds. Are you up for the challenge?

Do great green things with OVO Energy

So much has changed since we launched in 2009.  Our goal remains the same though: make energy cheaper, greener, and simpler. Just as it was on day one.

Everyone belongs at OVO

Our aim is to build a diverse and inclusive movement: teams of brilliant people, with unique talents, skills, passions, and experiences. 

We encourage everyone to join us, whatever your gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, life experience, or background. So please come as you are – we can’t wait to meet you.

Where in the world of OVO will I be working?

As OVO moves closer to 5m customers, we are starting to reshape our data teams to enable our strategy to provide a world leading, carbon net zero, and digitally enabled experience. The data teams operate in a federated structure, with both central and embedded teams, to support our growing scale and ambition.

Reporting into the Senior Data Engineering Manager for Retail, you will work within a team of data engineers developing innovative data products that deliver great business outcomes for our Retail teams. Your team will own the end to end development of data engineering pipelines, machine learning pipelines, critical business data APIs and data products on the whole. You’ll be responsible for engaging with different business teams to understand their data engineering needs and prioritising projects with your stakeholders. You’ll also work with more senior members of your team on professional development through mentoring and coaching.

Diverse teams are the best teams. Only when we represent everyone, can we create services which benefit everyone. We’re keen to meet people with varied backgrounds: the more inclusive we are the better our work will be. We understand some people may not apply to jobs unless they tick every box. And we know 'normal' office hours don't work for everyone, so we're open to discussing flexible working requests. If you're excited about joining us and think you have much of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure… we'd love to hear from you.

What will I be doing?

Key responsibilities include:

• Working with key stakeholders to understand their data needs and deliver solutions that provide them with excellent data pipelines that allows them to realise their objectives.
• Using your domain expertise to design data pipeline architectures that represent best practices in performance, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Migrating data across multiple platforms, and transforming and cleansing source data using batch and streaming ETL pipelines.
• Automating the ingestion of data from various sources including BigQuery, Cloud Storage, APIs, and Kafka.
• Ensure seamless integration of the data for Energy Tracker and Segmented Debt Pathways.
• Support key projects on data and machine learning with a focus on productionisation.
• Create and maintain Airflow data pipelines.
• Work with Data Scientists to integrate with data platforms such as Dataform and DataRobot.
• Driving software development, security and infrastructure best practises within the team that facilitate the delivery of high quality, stable solutions.
• Providing day-to-day support to data users by responding to urgent requests and fixing bugs.
• Have solid project management skills as well as change management.

• Work with more senior team members on professional development, including the usage of the various data and analytics tools available.

Is this the job for me?

Essential skills and experience:

• A proven track record of designing, building, testing, monitoring and managing large-scale data products, pipelines, tooling and platforms.
• A detailed understanding of data engineering principles and frameworks with a proven ability to evaluate various options with respect to data modelling, data pipelines, warehousing and storage layers.
• A proactive, data-driven and logical mindset.
• Experience working with cloud-based data solutions.
• Strong experience in SQL for analysis purposes.
• A thorough understanding of at least one programming language.
• Strong attention to detail and a relentless focus on software quality, including decentralised version control, rigorous testing and good observability to ensure your software does what it says on the tin.
• You will be comfortable working in an agile software development environment with regular release cycles, and have experience of pair programming, CI/CD and deployment strategies.
• A natural collaborator with excellent communication skills - build bridges.
• Able to translate business requirements/requests into a technical approach.
• Fluent English language skills (written & spoken).

Ideally…

• You are genuinely excited about developing data products that will positively impact over a million people and also our environment.
• You’re passionate about how organisations can use data to flourish.
• You love building scalable, resilient data products.
• Knowledge of and experience using cloud-based data engineering tools and technologies on the Google Cloud Platform including Dataproc, Dataflow, Composer, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions and more.
• A good grounding in Python, R and/or Scala.
• Experience in creating and productionising machine learning algorithms/models, particularly using VertexAI.
• Working on streaming ETL solutions utilising streaming data processing tools, such as Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub and Dataflow.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code processes and tools, particularly Terraform.
• Familiarity with Dataform and DataRobot.
• Working towards a Data Engineering certification or equivalent experience (i.e. through Coursera), such as:
• Astronomer Apache Airflow Fundamentals
• Astronomer DAG Authoring for Apache Airflow
• Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer
• AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty

• You seek learning opportunities to deepen your expertise or broaden your knowledge.

OVO Values

Here at OVO we have three core values that guide us as a business: 

Find a Better Way

We always look for a better way, whether that’s by delivering a better service, employing brilliant people or improving our products and processes

Do What's Right

Being open, honest and fair is one of the values which applies to everything we do. We take pride in talking to our customers and delivering exceptional work.

Build Something Great

Simple solutions aren’t quick or easy to find. They take time and tenacity. Our people work to find an answer that helps us ‘build something great’.

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.

OVO’s vision is to power human progress with clean affordable energy for everyone. Would you be interested in joining us to help achieve this?

Brilliant benefits for a world-changing team

Our people are at the heart of Plan Zero. That’s why we offer plenty of green benefits and progressive policies to make you feel at home.

For starters, you’ll get 34 days of holiday (including bank holidays).

Then there’s Flex Pay. It’s an extra 9% of your salary on top of your core pay to use as you like. You can take it as cash, add to your pension, or choose to spend it on a huge range of flex benefits.

Here’s a taster of what’s on offer:

For your health

With benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance depending on your career level, critical illness cover, life assurance, health assessments, and more

For your wellbeing

With gym membership, gadget, travel and cyber insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, DNA testing, dental insurance, and more

For your lifestyle

With extra holiday buying, discount dining, culture cards, tech loans, and supporting your favourite charities with give-as-you-earn donations

For your home 

Get up to £300 off any OVO Energy plan (when you pay by Direct Debit), plus personal carbon offsetting and great discounts on smart thermostats and EV chargers

For your commute

Nab a great deal on ultra-low emission car leasing, plus our cycle to work scheme and public transport season ticket loans

Want to hear about our full range of flexible benefits and progressive people policies? Our People Team can tell you everything you need to know.

Learn more about working in the OVO family of companies on our careers page and Glassdoor. We’re also delighted to have received a Top Employers certificate in 2018, 2019 and 2020!