Data Engineer – Gross Margin UK

Do you love data engineering? Do you also have experience analysing and getting value from financial data? If you’re a “strong yes” to both of those questions then you’ll love this role……Octopus Energy is now one of the largest suppliers of gas and electricity to UK householders, with 6.5 million customers and a multi-billion pound turnover. Our Gross Margin team is responsible for producing key financial outputs to report on the profitability of the business and the different products we offer to customers.
To do this, the Gross Margin pipeline produces a highly granular view of consumption, revenue and costs for every meter and delivery period on supply since Octopus started back in 2016. By running this regularly, we can break down the progression of historical and forecasted financial reporting by meter configuration (e.g. smart vs dumb meters), agreement type (e.g. fixed vs variable customers), billing status, cost types (e.g. wholesale and distribution) and consumption type (estimated vs actual).
Due to the growing scale of our customer base, the complexity of the UK electricity and gas markets, and the shift towards tracking consumption at a half-hourly level using smart meter data, we are therefore looking for someone to take on this great opportunity to combine data engineering, financial analytics and business critical need. 

What you’ll do

• Ensuring the Gross Margin team gets the financial outputs they need on a weekly/monthly basis to support accounting and audit requirements;
• Finding, troubleshooting and solving problems leading to shifting trends or irregularities in the gross margin numbers caused by changes in Kraken, industry or coding logic, including new changes in the market (e.g. EPG/EBRS);
• Working with a wide variety of teams across Kraken and OE Business to align and improve logic where possible, particularly with regards to customer edge cases;
• Comparing volumes to flows and costs to invoices to make sure the output aligns with how the industry is settling Octopus Energy;
• Designing and implementing easy-to-use processes that allow for flexible adjustments to the GM output for spontaneous accounting requirements;
• Expanding the use cases of the output and making it easily accessible so other UK teams can benefit from its granular detail and computing investment;
• Setting up dashboards to automate reporting, track data integrity and monitor variances against industry and Kraken;
• Improving the pipeline architecture and integrating automated tests to make it faster and more resilient to upstream data changes;
• Supporting gross margin accountants and analysts to level up their coding skills;
• Producing analysis and outputs required for RFI requests.

Who Are We Looking For:

• Strong aptitude with SQL and Python;
• Keen eye for detail to find root causes in the pipeline leading to shifts in output numbers;
• Ability to quickly understand new domain areas and visualise data effectively;
• Ability to translate technical code logic for a variety of business stakeholders;
• Team player excited at the idea of ownership across lots of different projects and tools;
• Passion for driving towards Net Zero;
• Drives knowledge sharing and documentation for a more effective platform;
• Experience with dbt, Airflow and Spark would be a plus.

Our Data Stack:

• This is the tool suite we currently use and will help you learn in this role:
• SQL-based pipelines built with dbt on Databricks
• Analysis via Python jupyter notebooks
• Pyspark in Databricks workflows for heavy lifting
• Streamlit and Python for dashboardingAirflow DAGs with Python for ETL
• Notion for data documentation

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 won best company to work for in 2022, on Glassdoor we were voted 50 best places to work in 2022 and 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 and most recently The Sunday Times, Best Places To Work 2023
• Visit our UK perks hub – Octopus Employee Benefits