Director - Forecasting

Job description

### Octopus Energy started with a bold idea: to build Britain’s first truly digital energy supplier. By combining world-class tech with brilliant humans who care deeply about customers and driving the renewable energy transition, we made it happen and in 2025, we became Britain’s largest energy supplier. ### ### We now serve over 12 million customers globally, are present in over 30 countries and manage a £7 billion portfolio of renewable energy assets. ### At Octopus, we prioritise generalists over specialists because our growth isn't limited to just one sector. We built Kraken into a £10B SaaS powerhouse, and are scaling ventures across Tech, Flexibility and Smart Heating among others. ### We are now looking to take our experience to new countries around the world. We are looking for someone to lead the build out forecasting and asset optimisation analytics in a new market for Octopus in East Asia. The role will cover forecasting price, generation and demand outturns. This will start off with a contained number of pilot projects to prove out the concept, but will expand to a national, multi-province approach. We envisage you spending a couple of months in Octopus HQ to get up to speed before deploying in country. This is a rare opportunity to create, build and lead a new function, targeting one of the largest opportunities in global energy. ### What You'll Do... - Get stuck in. This is a leadership role, but we’d expect you to spend most of your time coding at first: - Research fundamental data feeds - Identify and execute contracts with the best meteorology providers - Build generation forecasts for specific renewable plants (solar, wind or hydro) - Build system demand forecasts, how much demand, generation and interconnection will there be on the system at any given point in time - Combine the volume forecasts to generate price forecasts at varying time points, critically day-ahead and real time. - Ensure detailed understanding of real time price formulae and seek close replication in our processes - Quickly understand the requirements, identify optimal resource for a lean and efficient team, and lead recruitment of a high quality team - Designing a modular forecasting engine that can quickly adapt to different provincial market rules, ancillary service requirements, and varying price signals - Set and communicate the strategic direction for the software - Utilise LLM models for efficient development. Potential opportunity to partner with Anthropic or similar for case study project - Ensure (with necessary support) that we are acting in accordance with local data security standards - Propose and implement the desired tech stack, likely hosted on AliCloud. - Be a strong example of Octopus culture and work closely with Octopus and partner teams ### What You'll Need... - Experience building and leading high performing data science and analytics teams - Experience with sophisticated machine learning techniques - Full stack to be defined (and you’ll have the chance to influence) but proficiency with Python and SQL is vital - Experience managing complex data pipelines and visualisation suites - Excellent communication skills to relay complicated concepts in a way that everyone can understand - Openness to moving to an East Asian market - Prior experience in energy markets preferred - Speaking both English and Mandarin advantageous but not essential