Welcome to the first in our ongoing series of blogs about Engineering @ Correla, featuring contributions from across our engineering team. Stay tuned for insights, behind-the-scenes looks, and discussions on:
• Software Engineering
• Data Engineering
• Testing and Q&A
• Platform Engineering, SRE, & DevOps
• Service Management
In this opening blog, we’d like to share some of the interesting, exciting, and challenging work we have coming up at Correla to take us on the journey to a cleaner, greener energy market. There’s never been a better time to join our engineering team as we embark on the next stage of our growth.
A Bit of Background
Correla was formed with a clear vision: to build products and services that pave the way for the decarbonisation of the UK energy market. Initially, we worked closely with our industry partners to deliver products and services for the energy industry, launching our first products:
1. Discovery
2. Meridian
3. Contour
4. Waypoint
With these foundations in place, we’re now looking ahead to the future and the exciting things on the horizon.
Looking Ahead: Growth and Innovation
Fast forward to today, and Correla has grown significantly in maturity. With a wealth of product opportunities, healthy backlogs of work, and a robust sales pipeline, we’re engaging with new customers eager to solve complex problems within their organisations. Now is the time for us to expand our team. We believe the next few years at Correla will be an exciting and rewarding journey, and we’d love for you to be a part of it.
Investing in Our Technology
We are starting to make significant investments in our technology to change this, enabling us to build more quickly and deliver greater value to our customers.
Here’s how we’re doing it:
• Platform Services: We’re designing and building a new common platform on Azure to run all our products. Utilising the latest technologies, we’ll create a secure, scalable, and resilient environment. Our new Platform/SRE/DevOps team will spearhead this initiative.
• Application Services: We’re redesigning our applications to leverage the new shared platform. Instead of siloed products, we’ll develop a suite of reusable services that power the experiences across multiple products.
• Product Services: For Functionalities unique to specific products, we’ll build bespoke services to meet those needs.
All of this is designed to support our key ambition: transforming the energy market into a simpler, greener place. By investing in our technology, we aim to unlock several key benefits for our customers:
• Improved Responsiveness: We’ll reduce the time it takes to respond to customer demands, enabling us to address needs more quickly and effectively and resolve issues promptly.
• Cost Efficiency: By lowering our cost to serve, we can reinvest more in the technology that fuels our ability to deliver innovation.
Robust Services: We want to build products our customers can rely on, when they need them. Investing in our technology now, ensures that as the business grows, we can build in resilience, fault tolerance, and scalability as part of the core of our platform and product.
Developer Productivity: We want to ensure that our people are productive and have the best tools possible to help them. That’s why we are moving forward with an AI-first approach that empowers our people with tools like coding assistants and more general AI-powered productivity tools.
Investing in Our People
But technology is only part of the equation—we recognise that our people are our greatest asset. While we continue to invest in our existing team, now is the time to grow. We are recruiting across the engineering function into roles like:
• Software Engineering
• Data Engineering
• Platform/DevOps Engineering
• Site Reliability
• QA
• UI/UX
We have multiple roles across these areas and are looking to recruit the right people who can support us in building our platforms, products, and services, and having some fun along the way.
As we grow, we are committed to maintaining all the great aspects of our culture that make Correla a fantastic place to work. Here are some of the values that define us:
• Honesty and Transparency: When we come together to solve a problem, we each bring an authentic and honest version of ourselves. We challenge each other with respect and support good ideas. By fostering open communication, we build the best products and services for our customers.
• Respect and Autonomy: We treat everyone as an adult. We work hard and trust that everyone is doing their best to deliver for our customers. This respect grants us the autonomy to deliver in the ways we think work best, empowering innovation and personal growth.
• Collaboration and Teamwork: We believe in the power of teamwork, combining our diverse skills to achieve common goals.
• Continuous Learning: We foster an environment of continuous learning, encouraging personal and professional growth.
Our Pursuit of Platform Engineering
The next big change for Correla is the transition to platform engineering. Our aim is to commoditise all the complex things we do, making them more accessible and supporting our product engineering teams to deliver more value, more quickly, and more simply to our customers. We are bringing this about in a couple of ways:
• Standardised Platform: Our new platform will be standardised to simplify processes for engineering teams. If you conform to the platform’s requirements and build in the expected way, things will just work out of the box.
• Open Standards Protocols: We’re building a platform based on open standards and protocols. Some of the technologies we are using include:
– Azure
– Terraform
– Kubernetes
– Postgres
To make this a reality, we have started standardising our deployment processes so that we have an out-of-the-box set of build and deployment pipelines. New projects can use these to go from idea to production in record time.
Our Software Engineering Principles
To give you a flavour of the software engineering organisation we’re building, here are some of our core principles that guide our work:
• Focus on Quality: Build resilient and reliable software.
• Keep it Simple: Remove complexity wherever possible.
• Stay up to Date: Practice continuous improvement and avoid letting things become outdated.
• Build for What We Know: Focus on current requirements rather than anticipating future needs.
• Automate Everything: Reduce human error by automating processes.
• Work in the Open: Maintain transparency in all our work.
• Actively Innovate: Embrace innovation and learning, understanding that failures are part of the journey.
• Build Configurable Products: Develop flexible, configuration-driven products.
• Build for Continuous Delivery: Reflect our forward momentum in the way we build software.
Join Us on This Journey
This is just the beginning of building our new engineering organisation at Correla, and we’re hiring! If any of this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Check out our careers page, follow our blog for updates, or get in touch to learn more about what we do and how we do it.