Software Engineer
About us
Homes and businesses are adopting solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicles, creating and sharing energy like never before. This transition reduces Europe's reliance on fossil fuels and builds the energy sovereignty our continent needs to protect and expand its values.
It's exciting, but all that green power is straining our grids. At Powernaut, our smart software connects these energy devices into a single source of truth to enable effective management, reducing electricity costs, keeping grids stable and making clean energy work for everyone.
Join us in speeding up the energy transition, unlocking the full potential of renewable energy and building a brighter, cleaner, fossil-free world.
The role
Own products end-to-end — decide what to build, then build it — and help accelerate Europe's energy transition.
You own slices of our product from idea to production — you talk to customers, shape what gets built, then ship it yourself. You sit at the intersection of engineering and product, and you're measured on outcomes, not tickets closed.
We build AI-first. With agentic tooling, writing the code is no longer the hard part; the leverage is in judgment — knowing which problem is worth solving, designing the right thing, steering AI to build it at high quality, and knowing when it's good enough to ship. If you're an engineer who has started thinking more like a product person, and enjoys it, this role is built for you.
It's a T-shaped role: your core is high-quality technical execution, but you carry the product context and commercial awareness most engineers leave to someone else. You'll work directly alongside the founders and some of the sharpest people in the energy space, with high autonomy and a short path from your idea to real users.
What you'll own:
- End-to-end delivery: Take a problem from customer conversation and discovery through design, build, ship and iterate. You own the outcome, not a handoff.
- Your customers: You'll likely become the named "champion" for one or more customers — owning the account technically and staying in regular contact, from explaining how a new feature helps them to being their trusted technical point of contact.
- What gets built: Diagnose real customer pain, weigh impact against effort, and cut scope ruthlessly so value ships fast. You feed the recurring "implementation pains" back into the product as elegant, automated features.
- How we work: Relentlessly hunt down manual, repetitive effort and find new ways to make AI do the heavy lifting, so the team ships more with less overhead.
- Reliability: We run critical energy infrastructure, so things have to work. You build and maintain real-time systems where correctness, resilience and uptime aren't optional.
Where this can go
Powernaut is scaling fast, and this role is central to how we build. As the team grows, there are real paths forward — deepening into technical leadership and architecture, or broadening toward product ownership and team leadership. We don't hand out titles on day one; they're earned with results. But if your ambition is to shape both what we build and how we build it, this role is designed to grow with you.
Your profile
We're looking for a driven, entrepreneurial builder who is ready to make a tangible difference. You're Europe-based and able to work from our Ghent HQ regularly, with excellent written and spoken English and a strong fit for our Powernaut values.
- Experience: A strong software engineer (mid to senior) with a solid computer science background or equivalent and a track record of shipping real products. What matters is the quality of what you've built and owned, not years on paper — exceptionally ambitious early-career builders are welcome.
- Product instinct: You don't just take requirements, you question them. You're energised by customer problems and comfortable talking directly to customers — championing your work and explaining its value.
- A drive to work smarter: You're never satisfied with the status quo. You constantly look for more productive workflows and new ways to make AI and agentic tooling do the heavy lifting, with the judgment to know when to trust the output and when not to.
- Technical depth, stack-agnostic: Deep understanding of software architecture, APIs and data integration. Python, TypeScript and SQL are our house stacks, but strong depth in any serious language transfers.
- Outcome-driven: You're comfortable being measured on impact rather than activity, and you communicate and document clearly.
What's in it for you?
A competitive salary package with participation in our attractive stock option plan, the autonomy to manage your own work and decide what to build, and the profound satisfaction of making a lasting positive impact on our planet by accelerating the climate transition. You'll work from the Wintercircus in Ghent — a hub that fits the spirit of a fast-growing, innovative startup — as part of a dynamic, expert team of quick-thinking, fast-acting people who care about what they do.