Aotea Energy New Zealand

Location: Auckland

Employment Type: Full time

Salary Range: $70,000 - $110,000

About Aotea Energy

New Zealand has committed to a bold future: a fully electrified and resilient economy powered by renewable energy. But achieving this requires more than just generation; it requires flexibility, storage, and intelligence at the edge of the grid.

At AE, we believe that smart distributed energy storage is the cornerstone of this future. Our mission is to build in New Zealand the most affordable and intelligent battery system, empowering households to gain control over their power usage and cost, unlock flexibility, and accelerate the nation's energy transition.

We are vertically integrated across hardware, software, retail and installation, giving us full control over quality, cost and customer experience. This allows us to ship fast and work dynamically across hardware, software and retail arms of the business. 

The Role

You will have significant ownership over the product, shipping code that goes straight to customers who genuinely care about what we’re building. Your playground spans the entire stack: you'll sketch out a clean mobile UI, write Rust APIs, and deploy code that physically runs on hardware inside people's homes.

What you can expect

• True Full-Stack: be thrown in the deep end and expected to swim between our mobile app/frontend, our backend, and the code running on the batteries themselves.
• No telephone game: You’ll interact directly with our users. They are obsessed with energy tech, highly opinionated, and provide frequent and unfiltered feedback.
• Design & Execution: Designing and building sleek, intuitive UIs for our mobile app (and soon™, the web) to make sense of complex energy data.
• High Autonomy: We believe in outputs over everything, we're a passionate bunch driven by finding simple and elegant solutions to seemingly impossible problems.

What we've been building lately

We don't expect you to walk into a maintenance-only role. Here is a look at what the team has recently shipped or is currently scaling:

• Wholesale Trading Engine: A wholesale trading algorithm continuously refined, written predominantly in Rust. It takes electricity prices in real-time and converts those into high quality insights and decisions, slashing customer bills by an average of 67%.
• High Throughput Data Pipeline: An IoT ingest pipeline streaming millions of messages a day, processing these into hundreds of thousands of rows of real-time grid pricing, weather data, and battery telemetry.
• Fleet Orchestration: The core internal nationwide management platform that treats distributed home batteries as a single, coordinated power plant.
• The AE App: Our mobile app is always getting updates shipped that gives users real-time visibility and control over their hardware, savings, and billing.

Benefits

Going beyond raw compensation there are a few things that we think make our team and our business a unique place to work:

• Ambitious as hell: We’re all a little insane when it comes to ambition, with the business targeting 50MWh of distributed energy storage in the next 3 years. We aren't building another generic B2B AI SaaS wrapper that will “transform the world”; we're fundamentally changing how the grid and individual homes move power.
• Total ownership: There are zero layers of middle management to filter your ideas or slow you down. You get to drive the product forward and see the immediate impact on our users. If you build it, you own it.
• No meetings™: Only one company-wide per week. We really try to protect your heads-down time because we know context switching is an engineer’s worst nightmare. 
• Constant tech evolution: We don't lock you into a rigid box. Our stack evolves as our architecture scales to handle massive, real-time grid loads. If there’s a better tool for the job, we adopt it. Your skills will stretch constantly.

Things to know

For better or worse (we like to think it's better), we're a startup. Our team’s structure and dynamics are different from larger and older companies.

While half the tech world is fully remote, we're doing things a bit differently. Because we’re building an all-NZ product consisting of critical physical hardware (batteries powering people's homes) and complex software (sub second real time trading optimization and dispatch), we need to be close to the metal and the brains.

We are an Auckland-based, in-office first team.

Don't get us wrong, we aren’t clock-watchers. We fully support hybrid flexibility so you can live your life and work at your best.

In our office we also have 50+ kWh of R&D batteries + solar that we have fun playing with.  

Bonus Points 

To succeed, you just need to be a first-principled passionate troubleshooter. You get bonus points if you have experience with:

• Rust 
• UI/UX design
• React Native/Expo
• Energy markets
• IoT Device Management and data pipelines
• Hardware & Electronics
• AWS/IaC
• Optimization
• Data analytics
• Rodeo riding