Senior Backend Engineer (Go)

Northsea Grid · Energy and grid balancing

Own the dispatch service that decides, every second, whether 1.4GW of batteries should charge or discharge. Correctness matters more than throughput.

BackendSenior (5–9 yrs)HybridPermanentSponsors visas

Salary band

£85,000 – £105,000

0.05–0.15% options, 4 year vest

Location
Edinburgh
Pattern
Hybrid
In practice
Two days a week in the Leith office.
Posted
1 Sept 2026 (2d ago)
Process
3 stages, listed below
Apply for this role

No account needed. One of us reads it before anything reaches the company.

The work

The dispatch service reads market signals, battery state of charge and grid frequency, then decides what to bid into the balancing mechanism. It runs on a one-second tick and a mistake costs real money inside the hour.

Your first quarter would most likely go on settlement reconciliation: proving what we said we would do matches what the meters recorded.

Worth knowing

  • On-call is one week in six and it does get called. £400 a week plus time off in lieu.
  • Eight engineers, flat, no formal tech leads.
  • You cannot test against the real grid, so simulation quality is a first-class concern.

Must have

  • 4+ years commercial Go
  • Built systems where wrong output costs money
  • PostgreSQL beyond ORM defaults

Nice to have

  • Time-series data at volume
  • Energy or trading background
  • Kafka or similar

Interview process

If the client adds a stage after you’ve started, we’ll tell you, and you can withdraw.

  1. 01

    Intro call

    30 min

    Their questions and yours. No competency framework.

  2. 02

    Technical conversation

    60 min

    Walk through something you built. No live coding.

  3. 03

    Team and offer

    45 min

    Meet the people you would work with, talk numbers.