Principal Product Engineer

Job description

About ev.energy

We are building the world's largest EV-centric virtual power plant (VPP). By connecting to vehicles, chargers, batteries, solar, and other distributed energy resources, we turn households into flexible grid assets that balance supply and demand, preventing blackouts and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

We are scaling rapidly across North America and Europe. We are moving fast, we are AI-first, and we are looking for builders who want to power the grid of the future.

About the role

This is a role for a builder with a business brain. You'll spot product and business opportunities, prototype them quickly using AI, and know how to turn them into products people love. You’ll be someone who has built a product from the ground up, put it in the hands of real users and then scaled it - and you want to do it again.

This is not a role for someone who waits for consensus before moving. It is a role for someone who shapes the vision, owns the process, and raises the bar for everyone around them.

As Principal Product Engineer, you’ll own the product vision across one of our most critical growth areas: Users.

You’ll be helping residential customers optimise energy use across EVs, home batteries, solar generation, thermostats and grid load shifting (demand energy resources, multi-DER). You’re helping the end users of our products & services - delighting them through a seamless user experience.

You’ll work directly with Commercial, Demand Generation, and the CEO to translate market signals into product direction. You’ll use AI tooling to move at a speed that surprises people — turning ideas into working demos in days, moving from concept to MVP, and putting products in front of real customers fast.

Critically, this role exists to develop a new way of working. You’ll lead, inspire and motivate our Technology teams to build AI-first, prototype boldly, and ship without waiting for perfect. This role will also be key to crafting the Agentic AI operating model that defines how ev.energy delivers customer solutions going forward.

What you’ll do

Product vision & strategy

• Define, evolve and own the product vision for our end users (customers) — shaping the products, experiences, and capabilities that will define our next stage of growth
• Partner closely with Commercial, Demand Generation, and CEO leadership to identify key market and technology trends, along with deeply understanding the business’s growth strategy
• Spot and incubate new product and business opportunities, validating them fast with MVPs and taking the winners to paying customers alongside the Commercial team
• Turn ambiguous customer pain points into compelling product concepts, rapid experiments, and experiences that delight
• Act as a trusted product and technology voice with customers, strategic partners, and stakeholders across the energy ecosystem
• Influence not only what we build, but why we build it — balancing customer value, commercial impact, technical feasibility, and speed to market

Build, iterate, demo, ship

• Turn concepts into working prototypes and demos in days, not months — good enough to test with real customers, not perfect enough to slow you down
• Partner with Commercial and Demand Generation to actively support customer growth — bringing new product concepts and working prototypes into sales conversations, pilot programmes, and client engagements
• Know when a rough AI-generated prototype is right for the moment and when production-grade engineering is needed — and apply that judgment
• Kill weak ideas early, scale promising ones aggressively, and maintain an uncompromising focus on product impact and customer value
• See hard product problems as puzzles to solve through customer insight and rapid experimentation — and bring the kind of energy and enthusiasm for building products people love that raises the bar for the entire team

Lead our AI-first way of working

• Operate with AI as a core part of your daily workflow — using tools such as Claude, Cursor, and emerging technologies to dramatically increase speed, quality, and leverage
• Set the standard for what modern AI-native product engineering looks like — combining rapid execution, technical fluency, and strong product intuition
• Share knowledge openly, challenge outdated ways of working, and raise the capability bar across the wider Technology organisation
• Push ideas forward without waiting for perfect information or full alignment — move, then adjust
• Help shape a culture that values experimentation, velocity, ownership, and commercial impact as much as technical excellence

What we're looking for

Must-haves

• You've taken a product from 0 → 1 → many: turning an idea into an MVP, then into a real platform or app and growing it from its first users to a large, engaged user base
• Commercial instincts — you’ve been a founder, co-founder or founding engineer in a start-up/scale-up business or you’ve launched and led a new product from scratch in a larger organisation
• You’re comfortable owning pricing, monetization and selling to customers
• Strong product instincts grounded in direct customer conversations: you’ve shaped what you built by actually being in the room and talking to the people who use it
• Deep hands-on fluency with AI coding and prototyping tools (Claude, Cursor, or equivalent) as a genuine force multiplier in how you design, build, and ship products
• Experience leading small, fast-moving squads and influencing product direction without relying on hierarchy
• Experience or strong instincts around driving customer growth — particularly in how product design, onboarding, and enrollment experiences directly influence acquisition and retention
• High bias for action and comfort with ambiguity — you make good decisions with incomplete information and don’t wait for a perfect brief
• Clear, confident communication with low ego and high standards: you'll kill your own work when the data says to, and you know the best ideas don't always come from you

Nice to haves

• Experience in energy, utilities, cleantech, or adjacent domains — even if not deep
• Familiarity with home energy management devices
• Full-stack capability that lets you prototype independently without blocking on others
• A portfolio of things you’ve shipped — products, demos, or tools that prove how you work

Salary, benefits & how we work

The salary range for this role is £106,400-£130,300 GBP.

Key benefits include:

• Cash amount of up to 10% of your monthly salary, to cover the cost of buying or leasing an EV
• Equity - you'll own a part of the business through our share options program
• Healthcare options - to help keep you and your family in tip-top condition (provided by Bupa & Medicash)
• Life assurance of 4x your salary
• Co-working access via WeWork (if you'd like it)
• Annual 'Team Week' whole company offsite
• L&D allowance of £1,000 per year - everyone is learning, developing and challenging themselves so we have a professional development fund per year for you to learn new skills

You can find out more about our full range of perks and benefits here.

Location & how we work

This role is fully remote in the UK.

The majority of people at ev.energy work on a fully remote basis, with a small number of roles based on-site in our testing sites.

This means that most of our people work from home, but we're happy to provide co-working subscriptions if you'd like to spend time at a WeWork (or other co-working space close to you).

We balance our remote set up by getting everyone together once a year for an offsite, as we know that spending time together IRL is super important.

Belonging at ev.energy

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity: we do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status. If you'd like a copy of our DE&I policy you can reach us at hiring@ev.energy. We'll always do our best to accommodate reasonable adjustments to the interview process if needed - just let us know.