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Technical Director

Employer
Powervault
Location
London Bridge
Salary
£70k - £80k plus bonus plus options
Closing date
21 Aug 2019

Job Details

The Technical Director will lead all technical activities at Powervault including the following:

Lead Powervault’s technical development team to deliver the roadmap

  • Take ownership of products and their development, and to deliver product upgrades/improvements to agreed timescales and budget.
  • Manage the development team to develop high quality consumer products using standard design methodology
  • Provide technical leadership to create products which meets customer needs, cost effectively
  • Securing required technical resources, by recruiting staff and/or identifying sub-contractors
  • Work with the management team and board to agree a technology roadmap
  • Supporting roll-out and field issues
  • Identifying and delivering cost down opportunities in conjunction with Operations Director
  • Ensuring all technical compliance and regulatory documentation is complete
  • Scanning the technology landscape and working with our product marketing function to make sure that we are meeting customer requirements in the most effective way.
  • Managing external technical stakeholder relationships including research organisations / universities
  • Confident and comfortable in demonstrating plans to existing and potential investors in clear language that addresses the key investor issues (risk, ROI, runway, burn, opportunity, market potential).

Candidates will need to demonstrate experience in a role with these functions. Additionally, knowledge of battery technology, consumer product development or the energy sector would be helpful but is not essential.

Essential Requirements

  • Prior experience of designing consumer products manufactured in volumes of 10,000s
  • Project Management and planning
  • Ability to build, lead and continually improve performance of a technical team, experience developing technical staff including technical managers
  • Experience leading teams delivering electronic product development, cloud/Internet services development and data science/modelling
  • Ability to develop and manage relationships with third party CEMs
  • Extensive full product lifecycle New Product Introduction experience
  • Full understanding of relevant product development legislation
  • People and Technical Leadership

Personal Characteristics

The candidate will need to be:

  • able to deliver to deadlines and budgets while working under typical start-up constraints
  • highly motivated and prepared to operate in a dynamic early stage start-up environment
  • adaptable and self managing, high achiever
  • tenacious and driven
  • resourceful
  • proactive and organised
  • able to see the big picture while executing detailed plans

The candidate will hold a BSc/BEng electronic engineering/physics degree/etc and have 5-10 years experience in a similar job and 20+ years experience in total.

A commitment to meeting the challenge of sustainable development in the UK is welcome but not critical. The candidate will be expected to appreciate and understand the principles, benefits and barriers to the deployment of distributed storage.

To find out more about us, this role and to apply – please click the apply button.

Company

Powervault is a British company, headquartered in London. It designs and manufactures smart energy storage systems for the home, which store free solar energy and cheap electricity from the grid to reduce household energy bills and increase energy efficiency.

Our mission

Powervault was incorporated in 2012 to design and manufacture smart energy storage systems that help customers lower their electricity bills, increase their energy security and reduce their carbon footprint. It is also focused on changing consumers’ energy consumption behaviours by encouraging energy efficiency and the adoption of renewable energy technologies. Powervault is working with energy suppliers and National Grid to reduce dependency on fossil fuels by shifting energy demand away from peak times. This flexibility helps enable the roll-out of electric vehicles and accelerates the U.K.’s transition to a low-carbon, decentralised energy network.

Our history

Powervault was founded in 2012 by Sustainable Venture Development Partners and continues to receive its support. In 2013, Powervault won grant and prize funding from, amongst others: Innovate UK, Royal Bank of Scotland, Nesta and Climate KIC. This enabled the business to develop and test prototypes, and run product trials in homes. In August 2014, Powervault raised £150,000 in 8 hours on Crowdcube – a world record – just before the business started trading the following month. In 2015, Powervault raised a further £900,000 through Crowdcube and other private investors. This enabled the business to out-source its manufacturing to a professional electronics firm in Luton, and to start to develop its sales channels. To date, Powervault has raised £5.2m from its network of angel, crowd and venture capital investors.

Our market

Since April 2010, when the U.K. Government started offering generous Feed-in and Generation tariffs to home owners generating their own energy from clean technologies, there has been a proliferation of rooftop solar PV installations in the U.K.; 1 million U.K. homes now have solar PV installed on their roofs.

Simultaneously, there are two other established trends, which are currently driving the home energy storage market: rising electricity costs and decreasing storage costs. Electricity costs rose by 41% between 2007 and 2013 and are set to continue rising according to the Department of Energy & Climate Change (1). Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank has calculated that the cost of lithium-ion batteries has halved in a year and is likely to fall by 20%-30% per annum up to 2020 (2). The combination of these factors continues to strengthen the case for renewable energy storage solutions like Powervault.

With the roll-out of smart meters, energy suppliers are now starting to introduce ‘smart’ time-of-use tariffs, which vary in cost throughout the day. Powervault’s products can take advantage of these, which helps smooth the peaks in demand throughout the day, and ensures customers have access to cheap electricity during peak times. Powervault expects time-of-use tariffs to be widespread over the coming years, which means Powervault’s market will grow from the 1 million customers with solar PV installed to 25 million homes with smart meters installed.

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