About the role
Octopus was founded with a mission to use technology to accelerate us towards a low-carbon future. That’s why we created Kraken - our own technology platform from scratch which now serves over 70 Million households and is a core reason why Octopus is the number one energy supplier in the UK. We do it by hiring clever, curious, and self-driven people, enabling them with modern tools and infrastructure and giving them lots of autonomy.
We have been using GenAI in live, customer-facing environments since 2022, including one system that creates tens of thousands of high-quality emails for our Energy Specialists, combining our deep knowledge of the energy industry and the Octo communication style with customer-specific data from Kraken.
We are now looking for a Senior AI Engineer. You will build and scale the systems that allow Octopus teams to use Generative AI models (LLMs, RAG, agents). You will be hands-on, working with a cross-functional team to build out flagship AI projects, and the platforms that enable others to succeed with Generative AI.
You’ll work on developing solutions that genuinely move us closer to Net Zero in a company passionate about building great technology to change the way customers use energy. You’ll have wide open problems to solve, so you’ll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, figuring out an approach and validating it fast.
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What you’ll do
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Design and Develop AI Platform Services: Build reusable, scalable services that expose GenAI models, knowledge retrieval pipelines, and agent workflows to application teams.
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Knowledge Base Development: Build and maintain knowledge retrieval systems. Process heterogeneous documents like pdfs and build embedding pipelines that extract, chunk and embed into embedding models.
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AI Readiness: Process content from unstructured documents and make it AI ready: Optimize their structure, clear up text ambiguity, and embed rich machine-readable metadata.
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AI Ops, evals and observability: Set up framework for monitoring and evaluating AI output quality (relevance, accuracy, safety, drift, cost) and platform observability (latency, cost, usage).
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Centre of Excellence: Act as a centre of excellence for the whole business in the technical side of AI and LLMs usage, setting best practices and accelerating adoption.
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Governance and Guardrails: Create governance layers for implementing PII redaction, prompt filtering etc.
What you’ll need
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Deep GenAI & RAG Expertise: 2+ years of hands-on experience building and productionizing LLM applications, with deep technical knowledge of vector databases (e.g., Qdrant, Weavite, Pinecone, pgvector) and orchestration layers (e.g., LangGraph, LlamaIndex). Comfortable working with heterogeneous documents like pdfs. Experience working with re-ranking models.
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Production-Grade Asynchronous Python: Strong software engineering fundamentals with deep experience in asynchronous programming (asyncio, FastAPI) to handle highly concurrent, I/O-bound LLM and database calls.
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Advanced Context Engineering: Proven experience solving production RAG challenges such as context window management, metadata filtering and semantic routing. Experience leveraging coding harnesses like Claude code.
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Modern Software Practices: Mastery of Git, automated testing and CI/CD pipelines. Experience working with cloud platforms like AWS.
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Comfort with Ambiguity: Ability to rapidly prototype an approach, validate it with metrics, and pivot fast in a fast-moving environment.
It would be great if you had
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GraphRAG Experience: Familiarity with Knowledge Graphs (e.g., Neo4j) and ontologies to enhance standard vector RAG with highly structured, interconnected corporate data.
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Local/Open-Weight Model Deployment: Experience deploying and fine-tuning open-weight models (like Llama 3 or Mistral) via frameworks like vLLM or Ollama to optimize token costs and privacy.
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Prompt Caching & Cost Optimisation: Practical experience implementing semantic caching layers to drastically reduce LLM API billing and response latency.
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💚 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 Group 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 were recently named the UK's top company to work for, and we ranked in the top ten in the Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2024. Our Group CEO, Greg has recorded a podcast about our culture and how we empower our people. We’ve also been placed in the top 10 companies for senior leadership
• 🎁 Visit our UK perks hub - Octopus Employee Benefits
If this sounds like you then we'd love to hear from you. 🚀
P.S. Our process usually takes up to 4 weeks, but we’ll always do our best to flex around what works for you. Along the way, you’ll chat with our recruitment team and your Recruiter will help you throughout different stages. Got any burning questions before then? Drop us a message at talent@octoenergy.com and we’d love to help!
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.
