THE OPPORTUNITY
Sahana Energy is building the optimisation engine for clean, self-sufficient data centre campuses and we’re looking for a VP Engineering to join us.
Today, data centres are unsophisticated consumers of power. They are passive price takers, reliant on slow grid connection processes, exposed to volatile wholesale markets, and limited in their ability to optimise or trade their energy supply. We’re changing that.
Our platform, Kyros, takes data centre campuses from concept to fully energised and optimised. It’s already up and running in its initial form. In planning mode, it designs the optimal electrical configuration for a site. It optimises the mix of on-site generation and storage with off-site PPAs and tolling structures. It runs thousands of scenarios across price, weather, and load to identify the best combined physical and commercial setup.
In operating mode, it continuously evaluates asset state, generation and load forecasts, and market prices to determine the optimal power strategy in real time. It turns this into instructions dispatched to physical assets and executes trades in energy markets.
We’re not just building software. Our team brings decades of experience developing and deploying clean energy infrastructure. Alongside Kyros, Sahana Energy is developing state-of-the-art datacentre campuses in Ireland, the UK and Sweden. Kyros will be deployed at the campuses to manage and optimise the datacentre and colocated power generation infrastructure being developed. Routes-to-market with third party datacentre operators are another key angle for deploying Kyros.
We are well capitalised with £2M+ committed and are moving quickly towards a major funding round.
THE ROLE
As our VP Engineering, you will own the design, build, and deployment of the Kyros platform across active European markets. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will set technical direction, build the team, and take responsibility for delivering a system that works in real-world environments.
Your responsibilities include:
Build the team
Recruit, mentor, and lead a high-performing engineering team. Create a culture that is fast-moving, pragmatic, and low overhead, with a high bar for technical quality.
Own the architecture
Define the system architecture across optimisation, data, control systems, and external integrations. Make technology choices that balance speed, reliability, and long-term scalability.
Ship the platform
Set the roadmap, structure the work, and use modern, AI-enabled development workflows to deliver quickly. Own delivery against ambitious milestones.
Make it work in the real world
Work closely with site developers, power system engineers, trading teams, and third-party providers to integrate Kyros into live environments. Ensure the system performs reliably across hardware, software, and market interfaces.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
We care much more about what you have built and operated than how many years you’ve spent doing it. You should bring a strong track record of delivering complex, production systems, ideally where software interacts directly with physical infrastructure or markets.
Your superpower will be your ability to build, ship and evolve our cloud based system as required to achieve our targets. You’ll have strong domain expertise in as many of the following areas as possible, and you’ll hire and grow expertise across these, and more, areas as we move forward.
Power systems and optimisation
Power system models, optimisation engines, or energy system simulations, including modelling battery energy storage systems.
Markets and trading systems
Electricity markets, trading systems, or other market-based environments, as to how they operate and the systems that interact with them.
Time series, telemetry, and real-world integration
High-frequency time series data and telemetry, involving integrations with real-world assets through control systems, APIs, or industrial interfaces, and the messiness that comes with that.
Architecture and system design
Design, build, and operation of reliable, cost-effective production systems, across data processing, statistical and optimisation models, APIs, external integrations, and operational user interfaces, specifically cloud-based systems, with DevOps mindset.
AI-enabled development
Utilising AI tools for every part of the workflow to accelerate development, improve quality, and reduce toil, understanding where they add value and where they do not.
HOW YOU WORK
This is a founding role. How you work matters as much as what you know.
You are pragmatic and delivery focused
You prioritise what matters, avoid unnecessary complexity, and focus on building systems that are simple, reliable, and cost effective.
You stay close to the problem
You are comfortable getting hands-on across the stack, whether that is working on optimisation logic, debugging integrations, or working directly with site teams and real assets.
You’re an integrator
You can operate across technical, commercial, and operational domains. You work effectively with engineers, traders, and infrastructure teams and can translate between them.
You lead by doing
You build teams and set direction, but remain hands-on. You set the standard through your own judgement and execution.
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