Hi, I’m Andy and I am a Senior Engineering Analyst here at Krakenflex. I’ve been working here for just under 2 years. The nature of my role means that each day (and week) can be quite different. It is guaranteed to be both challenging and rewarding.
The term analyst sometimes causes some confusion. Our Engineering Analysts are all Electrical Engineers with a background in the Energy Sector. The role requires engineers who are just as happy to be delving head first into an electrical single line diagram or control philosophy document, as they are to be supporting the Sales team at a conference or presenting to a room of investors or asset developers on trends of new renewable generation technologies.
The energy sector is moving fast, and consequently so is the ask of what our products do and the assets we connect to. Our day to day can be anything from integrating with a 100MW Wind Farm site, to providing turn down of an industrial heat pump which is providing demand side response. This is what keeps the role exciting.
The below describes a typical office day. Most of the team are in the Manchester office, which means there’s plenty of opportunities for in person meetings and catch ups. A welcome change to staring at a small window of myself during Zoom calls and wondering why I’ve not repainted the wall behind me in the home office…
8.30AM - It’s the final call of the day for our Japan team, but the first for us! There is currently a roll out of KrakenFlex Gateways for a large industrial customer with clients in Japan. We are in the process of finalising the design documentation for the first set of sites, as well as outlining and agreeing the installation and commissioning process with the clients contractors. A few client queries have been raised which we will answer whilst the Japanese team enjoy their evening.
9.00AM - Time for a coffee and catch up with one of the Electrical Engineers in the Commissioning Team. We’ve got a 50MW battery site going live shortly, and the route-to-market testing is nearly complete. He explains to me some of the networking issues they experienced in the first few days of commissioning and how they managed to debug and solve it. We’ve been involved in this project for around 12 months, so we are all excited to see it complete and live.
9.30AM - Engineering Stand Up. Today we got to do it in person. Here the Engineering Analysts and Electrical Engineering team “run the board”. All projects and tasks are tracked in Asana and updated regularly. Our pipeline consists of integrating with a range of technologies from standalone and Co-located Solar and Battery sites, to onshore Wind Generation and industrial heat pump sites.
We try to keep these meetings snappy and mainly use it to call out priorities for the day and any blockers. It sounds like a busy day all round!
10AM - A chance to catch up on client Emails and team Slack messages. We use Slack for our internal communications, I’d never realised how important Giphy’s were to internal business communications until I started here.
11.30AM - Gateway Roadmap. These meetings are used to communicate with the Java Software Developers who maintain and develop the codebase for the KrakenFlex Gateway. Having this capability fully in house means we are able to respond quickly to new product requests.
One of the asset owners we work with wants to start creating a new suite of metrics on their portfolio of battery assets we control for them. We talk through the options we have to get this metric and how and where we will push this upstream to the KrakenFlex platform. With our Gateway being able to update Over-the-Air no site visit is required by an Engineer.
12PM - Lunch. The full team is in, so we gather in the Octopus Energy communal space to eat lunch and catch up.
1PM - Client Call. I attend a client call with one of our Account Managers. We are entering a new region and providing a new market service there. The site consists of a behind the meter battery co-located with some solar generation. It’s early in the project's inception, so we are working with the client's supplier to outline how our system works, answer any questions they may have and agree on a high-level controls philosophy for market services. No major concerns, but it does make me wish there was more standardisation in the industry. Our data science and commercial team also join to run our client through their financial modelling stack.
2PM - Documentation Check. I check and approve some documentation produced by a colleague in my team. All documentation gets a second pair of eyes prior to being sent to clients. The draft design pack is then passed on to our Project Managers to issue to the client for comment.
4PM - Showcase. This is a company wide ceremony, where each team presents what happened in their last two week sprint (we work to agile methodologies). There is a good office turnout today, but everything is run hybrid so anyone who is remote can dial in. It’s very easy to focus on your immediate projects and responsibilities, but it’s always refreshing to see what's happening in the wider company. It also gives a good insight as to what projects are in the pipeline and new functionality we can talk to customers about.
5PM - Final email catch up before the end of the day. There is a social after work, some of the team are going axe-throwing. I’m glad to report that no Engineers were harmed during this event!
If this sounds like something you could be interested in, please check out the KrakenFlex Careers page to see if any of the roles excite you.
Comments