Head of R&D - Digital Energy

Are you the kind of researcher who is never fully satisfied by a paper — who wants the model, the algorithm and the market mechanism to end up inside a product that real households, communities and businesses actually use? Do you have the scientific depth, the leadership instinct and the "cazzimma" to build a research function from the ground up and make it deliver?

Koala is looking for a Head of R&D to lead the scientific core of our platform. At Koala we are digitalizing, democratizing and decentralizing the energy market: we build the digital services that let prosumers, energy communities, professionals and public administrations enter a market that today is designed to keep them out.

💡 Your Responsibilities

• Own Koala's R&D roadmap end to end: define the research agenda across our whole perimeter — energy sharing and collective self-consumption, digitalization of energy services, flexibility aggregation, decentralized energy trading, and participative ownership models for distributed assets.
• Lead the core research lines: modelling of resources; ML/DL forecasting; algorithmic aggregation, matching and price formation; market and mechanism design for decentralized exchange.
• Translate research into product: work side by side with product and engineering so that models, algorithms and market mechanisms are specified, validated, integrated and monitored in production — not left in a notebook. Define what "good" looks like in metrics, and hold the bar.
• Build and lead the team: recruit, mentor and manage researchers and quantitative profiles; set standards for experimental design, reproducibility, code quality and peer review; grow a small group that punches well above its size.
• Run our academic programme: coordinate the inter-university research programme we are building, structured in work packages assigned to different universities and research partners — scope, deliverables, milestones, interfaces between work packages, and the governance that keeps them aligned.
• Drive funded research: identify and pursue national, regional and European funding lines; write and structure proposals, lead consortia, and manage the technical and reporting obligations that come with them.
• Own the regulatory-scientific frontier: track how European rules on energy sharing, flexibility, aggregation and market access evolve, and turn regulatory change into research questions before it turns into a constraint.
• Represent Koala scientifically: publications, white papers, patents where they make sense, conferences, standardisation groups, pilot projects with system operators and institutional partners.
• Bring rigour to decisions: build the data foundations, benchmarks and simulation environments that let the company argue about designs with evidence instead of opinions.

🎓 What We're Looking For

• MSc or PhD in Electrical/Energy Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Operations Research, Economics or a related quantitative field. A PhD is welcome; a strong applied track record without one is equally welcome.
• 5-8 years of experience in applied research, quantitative modelling or algorithm development — in industry, in a research centre, or across both — with a meaningful part of it in energy, electricity markets, or a comparably complex regulated domain.
• Demonstrable experience taking models from prototype to production: you have shipped something, seen it break, and fixed it.
• Programming skills in Python (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, and the deep-learning framework of your choice); familiarity with optimization solvers (Gurobi, CPLEX or open-source equivalents) is a plus.
• Leadership experience: you have led researchers, engineers or a project team, and you can show what you built and who you grew.
• Experience with funded research — European, national or regional programmes — from proposal writing to consortium coordination and reporting. Prior collaboration with universities is a plus.
• The ability to explain hard technical concepts to non-technical people without making them wrong in the process — to a founder, a regulator, an investor or a customer.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a startup perimeter: you decide what not to research, as often as what to research.
• Excellent knowledge of English; Italian is a strong plus given our academic and institutional network.
• "Cazzimma" — the determination, intellectual tenacity and drive to push a hard problem all the way to something that works!

🌍 Why Koala?

Koala is a forward-thinking, flexible company driven by a simple goal: to make energy accessible, transparent and shared. We value every team member for their unique strengths and potential. Here you will find a team that believes in collective growth, hard work, deep thinking and a clear focus on results.

💥 What We Offer

• Full-time position with a competitive salary based on your experience and qualifications.
• Smart working options up to 100% remote, adaptable to your needs.
• A genuine mandate: this is a function to be built, not inherited. You define the research agenda, the team and the standards.
• A research programme with real institutional weight — an inter-university network, funded projects, and problems that are open in the literature and urgent in the market at the same time.
• Freedom to publish and to engage with the wider scientific community.
• A sector being rewritten right now, and work whose effect is visible: projects entering operation, bills going down, communities coming into existence.

📍 Location

Remote working is welcome, but you'll always find a home base in Benevento, Avellino, Salerno or Torino (so far!).

🚀 Ready to build the science behind decentralized energy?

If you want to lead research that ends up in production rather than in a drawer — and to do it in a company that builds its own tools instead of buying them — Koala is waiting for you. Apply now and let's build an intelligent, democratic and decentralized energy future together.