Senior Data Scientist - Smart Charging

Job Description

Our mission is to make clean power accessible. We are passionate about making a positive impact on communities and the environment where we work.

We're designing, financing, building and operating the world's most sophisticated battery systems to enable the take up of more renewable power, electrifying fleets for cleaner air, and providing clean, portable power including repurposed electric vehicle batteries. Our proprietary software and data analysis optimises operational performance for our customers to reduce emissions and costs.

Since we began in 2017, we've raised over £2.7 billion in debt and equity funding and transformed it into >1.2GW of grid-connected batteries live or under contract and c.3,400 electric vehicles supported. We have operations in the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the US and Canada, with a global headquarters in London.

We're the leading owner and operator of battery storage in the UK, supporting the National Grid with the uptake of renewable power. We also work with c.90% of the UK's major bus companies, powering 25% of the UK e-bus market. We're also the number one owner and operator of e-buses in Australia and New Zealand, and are quickly expanding into light commercial vehicles and trucks. Our rapidly growing company is looking for highly talented and motivated people to join us.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist with a background in Python-based modelling, optimisation and expert data insight to lead our smart charging analytical offering. You will be responsible for the overall delivery of our smart charging optimisation processes, focused on minimising energy costs and maximising ancillary revenue through the dynamic optimisation of EV charging control strategy.

As part of the EV Analytics team, within Product Management & Engineering, you will work closely with our software, data engineering and operational teams to successfully develop and deploy cloud pipelines to optimise the charging strategy on our EV fleet sites globally. You will be the main developer of models and data flows in the pipeline with additional responsibilities including the technical leadership and planning for the domain.

As an experienced member of the team, you will be a role model for coding and analytical excellence, mentoring colleagues and being a key point of contact for stakeholders across the business. Utilising your knowledge of energy tariffs, grid services and energy markets you will work with power procurement and flexibility service colleagues to maintain holistic commercial optimisation as the north star of our smart charging offering.

A Taste of the Day to Day

• Leading development of our charging strategy optimisation pipeline: writing python code for data processing, physics-based simulation, commercial optimisation and data insight.
• Diving into the operational, commercial and technical details of EV charging sites to tailor our modelling and optimisation pipelines to each customer and geography across our global portfolio, adapting to local constraints and opportunities in each case.
• Managing the roll out of smart charging across our international portfolio and in partnership with business development and customer success colleagues, you'll use data and expert insight to highlight the value of smart charging to customers and help resolve operational concerns
• Work with large fleet and charging datasets to train machine-learning models for predicting vehicle energy consumption or correlate physics-based models for virtual recreation of charging operations as a digital twin simulation.
• Testing and cloud-deployment of code whilst ensuring alignment of ways of working with other technical teams
• Pairing with other team members contributing to the smart charging codebase and reviewing pull requests to maintain coding standards.
• Strategic planning of the smart charging analytical roadmap, aligning the delivery and dependencies of new features with product managers and balancing customer value delivery with reliability and effort
• Management of team members working in the smart charging domain including work planning, reviewing and 1:1s.
• Engage with onboarding and operational teams to define data requirements and testing plans in support of model development and correlation (e.g. charging or vehicle energy consumption).
• Keep up to date with evolving smart charging opportunities and business cases, and the expanding needs of the business with a growing number of technologies and geographies supported.
• Drive innovation in our modelling, analysis and data insight approaches through L&D and trialing novel concepts.

Health and Safety

• Actively contribute to Zenobe's commitment to health and safety, wellbeing and sustainability by; integrating these principles into daily responsibilities, ensuring a safe and supportive work environment, promoting both the physical and mental health of self and colleagues, and adopting sustainable and energy-efficient practices to minimize environmental impact. By doing so, each employee at Zenobe plays a vital role in fostering a culture that prioritises overall safety, holistic wellbeing, environmental sustainability in our business operations.

What We're Looking For

We realise that certain groups of people are less likely to apply for a role if they don't meet 100% of the job requirements. To be absolutely clear: if you like the look of this job and think you could do it well, we encourage you to apply with a CV that highlights your transferable skills and experience. Above all, Zenobē is looking for collaborative, flexible, empathetic people who are interested in creating and promoting practical routes to a zero carbon world.

Essentials

• STEM degree (e.g. engineering, applied physics, data science)
• 4+ years of relevant professional experience working in modelling, simulation, analytics and optimisation preferably in an EV or energy-adjacent domain
• 5+ years' experience with Python (pandas, scipy, plotly, scikit-learn, and other scientific / data libraries) and it's developer tooling (e.g. uv, ruff, mypy)
• A pragmatic approach to problem solving, follower of the 80/20 rule balancing outcome with effort and comfortable working with imperfect real-world data
• Solid SDLC and collaborative software practices including GIT for version control, testing, CICD, environment management etc. Ability to mentor others on advanced use of Python.
• Technical background with good understanding of the underlying physical principles related to electric vehicles and the energy sector
• Familiarity with energy markets, tariffs, grid services and commercial aspects of the energy sector
• Confidence in working with autonomy, spearheading areas of technical development and representing our technical expertise both internally and externally
• Demonstrable leadership in the planning and delivery of projects, accountability to senior stakeholders and line management of team members
• A working knowledge of data engineering and cloud platform concepts
• Excellent mathematical, analytical and problem-solving ability
• Excellent professional communication, reporting and presentation skills
• Experience with cloud providers and cloud infrastructure deployment (preferably AWS).

Nice-to-haves

• A deeper understanding of EV charging and the various facets: charging physics, charger / battery / system electrical performance & limitations, charging control & OCPP
• Expertise in fleet operations: fleet parking dynamics, scheduling, depot operations.
• Additional software engineering skills - (e.g. Linux, SQL, AWS and network design)
• Additional EV / Energy engineering experience not limited to design, development, analysis, testing or controls of EV / Energy systems
• Additional data science experience, in particular related to EV fleets, charging and energy markets
• PhD in a relevant field of engineering or data science

Working at Zenobe

We're passionate about sustainability and are proud to offer Team Zenobē a pioneering and collaborative working environment. We encourage our people to take ownership of their career progression and celebrate those that can think outside the box.

If you'd like to join our community of likeminded people hit the apply button now, we'd love to hear from you!

What We Offer

Charge your career at Zenobē and receive

• Up to 33% annual bonus for being awesome
• 25 days holiday, increasing with length of service up to 30 days, plus bank holidays
• Private Medical Insurance
• £1,500 training budget per year, to ensure you grow as we do
• EV Salary Sacrifice Scheme
• Pension scheme, up to 8% matched contributions
• Enhanced parental leave
• Cash back health plan
• Plus more

Lots of our people work flexibly in many different ways, including part-time, flexitime and hybrid working. We can't promise to give you exactly what you want, but please talk to us about the flexibility you need and let's see how we can make it work.

Our Approach to Diversity and Inclusion

Our people are our strongest asset and the key determinant of our success, and we value a range of skillsets and perspectives. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute. We work to provide equal opportunities and an inclusive work environment, where everyone is fairly treated in the application process and through their career at Zenobē. If there are any adjustments that would help improve your experience with Zenobē, please let us know when you apply.