(Senior) Data & Platform Engineer Grid Operations (m/f/d)

Net Zero is a specialised consultancy for energy infrastructure and transformation. We work at the intersection of the energy sector, digitalisation, data management and software development. The energy sector is changing fundamentally: more volatility, more data, more systems, more operational complexity. This increases the need for people who can understand, design and help build digital solutions themselves. With us, you lead topics on your own responsibility, work closely with decision-makers and business units and help shape a consulting offering that makes the energy sector more digital, more data-driven and more future-proof.

You build data platforms that hold up in operation: from data storage through pipelines and APIs to hosting on Kubernetes. If you have already built and owned platforms like these, you are just as welcome as someone in their first years in data engineering or software development who wants to go deeper into platform topics. Depending on your experience, you join us at junior or senior level. We will clarify this together during the application process.

Whether you come from the energy sector is secondary. What matters to us is that you want to get to grips with the data world of grid operations, from grid models to time series from grid control. We work to the highest quality standards in our consulting and are looking for someone who shares that standard.

Your responsibilities

• Platform build & operations: You build and run data platforms for grid operators, from persistence to application hosting. Whether you own entire platforms or individual components depends on your experience.
• Data storage: You implement the right storage: relational databases, time series stores, object storage, lakehouse formats and graph stores.
• Data integration: You harmonise data from heterogeneous source systems, develop mappings to shared data models and ensure data quality and consistency.
• Pipelines & streaming: You develop data pipelines and streaming integrations, for example with Kafka.
• APIs: You provide data via APIs, connect source systems and own the stable operation of these interfaces.
• Infrastructure: You run container platforms (Kubernetes, OpenShift) and automate infrastructure with infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform), in on-premises data centres, in the sovereign cloud or in Azure.
• Operational reliability: You own backup, disaster recovery, monitoring as well as data quality and metadata.
• Test automation: You automate tests in CI/CD pipelines and provide reproducible test environments.

Your profile

• A completed degree (master's or Diplom) in computer science, business informatics, data science or a comparable technical field of study. Strong academic results and analytical sharpness are a clear plus for us.
• Relevant professional experience in data engineering, platform engineering or software development, also outside the energy sector.
• Hands-on experience with at least one database or time series technology (e.g. PostgreSQL, Oracle, TimescaleDB, InfluxDB) and at least one container or cloud platform.
• Solid programming skills in Python and SQL as well as experience with scripting (e.g. Bash, PowerShell) for automation and operations.
• Experience working on Linux distributions (in particular RHEL).
• Security awareness for running business-critical systems.
• You think entrepreneurially and solution-oriented, spot opportunities early and are driven to visibly move topics forward.
• Good German and good English.

For a senior-level start, you also bring:

• Several years of experience in data engineering or platform engineering, including expertise in building, hosting and running data platforms.
• Experience developing, deploying and running API-based interfaces (e.g. REST, GraphQL, event-based via Kafka), including authentication, versioning and monitoring.
• Confident use of CI/CD (e.g. GitLab CI, Jenkins) and infrastructure as code.
• Experience integrating and harmonising data from heterogeneous sources, including data modelling, mapping and quality assurance.

A plus:

• Experience in the energy sector, in particular close to grid operations.
• Experience with CIM/CGMES data, grid models and semantic technologies (RDF, SPARQL, graph or triple stores).
• Experience with lakehouse formats and platforms such as Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Databricks or Microsoft Fabric.
• Experience with hyperscalers such as Azure and/or sovereign cloud providers such as STACKIT.

What we offer

• Visible responsibility: You work on projects and topics that have immediate impact, with direct sparring with the founders and short paths to decisions.
• A modern way of working: Fast iterations, a modern toolchain, AI assistance and pragmatic collaboration instead of long approval loops.
• An attractive setup: Flexible working, attractive pay, honest feedback and an environment where performance is visible.
• Growth with perspective: You grow professionally, methodically and entrepreneurially, with room for your own ideas, responsibility and development.