Above & Beyond - Climate Tech Recruitment
Chief Technology Officer
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER (CTO)
Architect of the Universal Exchange Layer for the Energy Grid
London, UK | Full-time | Hybrid (3+ days in office)
THE OPPORTUNITY
Every era of technology produces a layer everything else is built on. Payments have one. Communications have one.
The energy grid - the machine that decides how fast the AI era gets built - doesn’t have one yet. And the whole world is feeling it: 283 GW sits stuck in the UK connection queue, more than 2,600 GW in the US - twice the country’s installed capacity - and the $600bn+ a year now flowing into AI data centres waits 5-10 years for power that already exists.
We think this is a market problem, not an engineering one. The capacity exists and the demand exists, but there is no mechanism for pricing one against the other. Open Banking solved the same problem for bank data, and an entire industry was built on top of it.
The convergence of AI, FinTech, and energy is not a prediction - it is inevitable. The future is energy and information transacted at speed.
ZEAL is building that layer for the grid - the energy and data exchange layer. This is the seat that builds it: founder-grade scope, a platform designed from first principles, and a market whose ceiling is the global energy transition itself.
ABOUT ZEAL
ZEAL is building Open Banking for the Energy Grid - the universal exchange layer connecting DNOs, NESO, grid operators, and thousands of energy assets (data centres, C&I, BESS) into a single unified platform. The data infrastructure that turns idle grid capacity into fast, flexible connections.
The ZEAL platform - codenamed Gluon - runs the full market cycle: Model → Price → Connect.
- Model - ingest live facility and network data (metering, power, cooling, constraint zones); map how much load every conductor and substation can safely carry, hour by hour; run what-if simulations across capacity, curtailment, and flexibility.
- Price - split the connection into a firm tier and a conditional tier and price each: a two-tier quotation engine that moves from Level 1 estimate to Level 2 bankable quote in weeks, not months.
- Connect - issue the Flexibility Passport: a portable, auditable connection artefact with day-ahead operating limits. The asset goes live on a flexible, non-firm connection and stays grid-powered over 99% of the year.
Our mission: democratise the energy future - abundant, intelligent, and open to all.
THE PROBLEM
A UK-starting problem. A global one in waiting.
- Connection queue: 700+ GW pre-reform to 283 GW post-reform. Oversubscription persists.
- Lead times: 5–10 years to connect a data centre. Capital flows to faster jurisdictions.
- Utilisation gap: 65–80% of contracted grid capacity sits idle - roughly 10 GW of untapped C&I flexibility in the UK today, and ~£70bn of system savings from reinforcement it makes unnecessary.
The bottleneck is not power. It is information.
The grid has no order book: nobody can see, price, or trade available capacity. Idle grid capacity is one of the largest stranded assets in the industrial world - and the same structural gap exists in the UAE, Japan, Australia, and the US, wherever AI demand outruns grid architecture designed for a static century.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Whoever builds the layer that makes that capacity visible, priced, and tradable becomes the standard. That is the company we are building.
WHY NOW - REGULATION, DEMAND, TRACTION
- Regulatory tailwind: Connections Reform prioritises flexible connections; the MHHS mandate makes half-hourly settlement data universal; RIIO-ED3 pushes DNOs toward flexibility and innovation. The rules of the market are being rewritten in ZEAL’s favour - on a clock.
- Live commercial engagement: pilot engaged with a Tier-1 UK data-centre operator - pricing model validated, chief executive has confirmed written support.
- Network-side validation: two live grid-innovation programmes now in motion - a national transmission operator and NESO engaged as co-leads, a leading UK DNO as lead licensee - backed by an independent innovation-funding application and a live utility innovation-allowance proposal, both anchored to the same confirmed Tier-1 pilot site, going live from January 2027.
- Scale path: from a single anchor site, to 100 MW across sites, to a gigawatt - the pilot validates the per-site figure, the platform makes it repeatable.
THE ROLE
As CTO you join the Leadership Team and own the architecture, build, and deployment of ZEAL’s platform. You translate the mission into deeply technical execution: scalable, intelligent, secure systems that power the consent- based data layer of the grid and orchestrate the AI-driven energy economy.
You will be responsible for:
- Defining ZEAL’s end-to-end technical vision and the 12–24 month product and platform roadmap.
- Leading engineering across data ingestion, standardisation, simulation, pricing, and the API surface.
- Bridging digital infrastructure and physical energy systems - real DNO-to-data-centre interoperability.
- Setting the technical blueprint ZEAL exports from the UK to the UAE, Japan, Australia, and the US.
This is a builder’s seat. You are in the codebase for the first 12–18 months, and everything you architect becomes the reference design for every market ZEAL enters.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Platform Architecture & Delivery (50%)
- Architect ZEAL’s API-first market infrastructure: ingestion from DNO source systems and facility systems (metering, power, cooling), standardisation, simulation, and the two-tier pricing engine that turns raw grid data into bankable quotes.
- Build secure, low-latency engines for real-time telemetry, consent-based data exchange, and connection pricing - and the Flexibility Passport pipeline: portable, auditable, contract-grade artefacts with day-ahead operating limits.
- Own bank-grade security as a product feature - end-to-end encryption, authentication, FAPI-grade consent management. We sit between regulated networks and critical infrastructure: trust is the moat.
- Embed ML as a first-class capability - feature stores, real-time inference, model governance, scenario simulation at scale.
- Build AI-native from day one. Agentic development, AI-accelerated research, prototyping, and design are how a small team here ships at the pace of an organisation ten times its size. You ship faster because you master the tools, not in spite of them.
- Ship production code.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
Technology Strategy & Roadmap (20%)
- Own the systems architecture and platform roadmap; make the build-vs-buy and defensibility calls that compound.
- Run sprints and technical workshops with the team - set the agenda, break down the work, ship to priorities.
- Translate regulation and market signals (Connections Reform, MHHS, RIIO-ED3) into product decisions and prioritisation.
- Act as the technical authority in regulator, DNO, and partner conversations led by the CEO - credible with network operators, NESO, Ofgem, and data-centre operators when called in.
MVP & Prototyping for Investors and Clients (20%)
- Build and ship working prototypes that turn the ZEAL thesis into something investors can see and clients can test - fast.
- Own the demo platform: live data, working simulations, screen-ready for any board, VC, DNO, or procurement meeting.
- Convert pilot conversations into signed contracts on the strength of platform performance.
- Iterate weekly on what investors and clients actually respond to. Speed of learning is the metric.
Team & Culture (10%)
- Recruit and grow a top-tier engineering team across platform, back-end, data, and AI/ML - post-Seed.
- Set engineering principles and review standards; build a culture of shipping.
- Run weekly and monthly retrospectives on work shipped and lessons compounded.
THE IDEAL CANDIDATE
You are a deep-tech systems builder and market-infrastructure thinker. You have led platform engineering in regulated, multi-stakeholder domains, and you think in protocols and platforms, not products. You have built and shipped at the intersection of energy, grid, AI, Open Banking, and platform infrastructure.
Core capabilities
- Designed and shipped multi-tenant, API-first data platforms with consent, data quality, and versioning as first-class practices.
- Time-series data engineering at scale - telemetry, half-hourly settlement, real-time streams.
- AI/ML platform design - feature stores, real-time inference, simulation engines, model governance.
- Cloud-native engineering (AWS or GCP), Kubernetes, IaC, event-driven microservices, Python and TypeScript.
- Bank-grade security and consent architecture as first-class concerns.
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE
Domain depth in at least two of the following:
Energy & Grid
- Worked with DNO, TSO, or NESO data - ingested it, modelled it, or built products on top of it.
- Fluent
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Location