As a member of the Octopus Tech Team, you’ll have real ownership, variety, and the chance to shape products that make a tangible difference in people’s lives – lowering bills, enabling greener living, and delivering experiences customers genuinely love. We’re expecting senior technical leadership, you will have tech decision-making authority, lead initiatives across domains, solve deep technical challenges, and align with global tech strategy. But you won’t be alone, you’ll work side by side with teams across customer service, sales & marketing, operations, finance and data, and see the impact of your work in the real world, fast. You will also be a member of our global engineering community, where support is just a Google Meets or Slack message away.
We’re looking for people who want to take part in this journey and help shape the future of energy in Japan. If this sounds exciting, we’d love to chat.
There’s a couple of things you should be aware of about this role. You may initially be employed by Kraken Tech Japan, our sister company in Japan, then, at some future time in the near future, transfer your employment to Octopus along with other tech staff in our other markets across the world.
We’re expanding the scope of our tech team, and we are looking for Backend Engineers to join our team to lead backend development on some exciting new products. You will play a key role in leading the backend domain and building scalable, reliable services that power the future of energy in Japan.
Responsibilities
- Build and operate Octopus Energy products for the Japanese market (with many on the horizon). Including driving architectural decisions, improving reliability and performance, and aligning global tech strategy with local requirements
- Design and develop APIs to integrate with other systems and services. For example, lead API design standards, review complex integrations, and ensure consistency across services
- Collaborate with international teams (UK, EU, APAC and USA) in global development projects
- Develop and operate Octopus Energy’s core global backend system
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional experience in backend web application development
- Hands-on experience with Python/Django or equivalent web frameworks
- Architectural understanding, best practices, system decomposition, and mentoring others
- Experience designing and operating RDBMS (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL)
- Experience in team development using Git
- Experience with secure, reliable, large-scale/ high-transaction systems
- Experience developing and operating systems in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Experience with microservice architecture
- Ability to communicate in English (participating in meetings and discussions, reading and writing)
- We’re looking for someone with a general interest in technology and problem-solving; someone diligent and thoughtful. It would be helpful to have experience/expertise in the following (in rough priority order):
- Python
- Django (or equiv. web framework)
- Domain modelling
- Designing distributed systems, improving service reliability, and shaping long-term architectural strategy.
- HTTP and REST APIs, GraphQL and other API technologies
- Writing robust and fault-tolerant software
- Celery and async processing
- Postgres
Nice to haves
While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.
- AWS experience
- Terraform, Packer, or Consul experience
- Ability to speak Japanese
