Principal Product Engineer

Description:

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