Sunsave
The numbers that mattered
Sunsave is making solar accessible to UK households through a fully regulated subscription model, which means the engineering has to satisfy financial regulation as well as physics. They needed a product function, engineers who could ship inside a regulated environment, and technical management for a field operation. All at once, while the company added roughly forty people in a year.
Roles filled
Product, engineering and technical management
Time to shortlist
Still employed
Time to hire
First hire to most recent start
Still hiring
Further roles live on the account today
Six hires across two disciplines and two engagement models, at a company doubling in size. The hard part was never volume. It was that a Head of Product, a permanent backend engineer and a field-based technical manager are three completely different searches, and running them one after another would have taken eighteen months the business did not have.
We ran permanent and contract on one account
Most agencies would have treated this as three separate mandates and sequenced them. We ran product, engineering and field technical management in parallel on a single account, with one person holding the whole picture, because the roles depend on each other. The Head of Product shapes what the engineers build. The technical manager owns the quality of what actually gets installed on a roof.
The second decision was to use both engagement models. Two of the six went in on contract to cover a delivery peak, which meant the team got capacity in weeks without the business committing to permanent headcount it was not ready to carry. The other four were permanent hires into roles that needed to still be there in three years.
A product function, an engineering team, and the field operation behind them
Six hires between March and September: a Head of Product to own the roadmap, permanent software engineers building the platform, a technical manager responsible for installation quality across a region, and two contract engineers covering a delivery peak.
Three further roles are live on the account, including the Head of Software Engineering. That is the part that matters more than any single hire: the client kept coming back.
Two disciplines, one engagement
A Head of Product, permanent engineers and a field-based technical manager are three different searches. Sequenced, they take the better part of eighteen months. Run in parallel on one account, the first hire started in March and the sixth starts in September.
Engineers who are not surprised by regulation
A regulated subscription product means compliance sits inside the engineering work rather than beside it. We sourced from teams who had already built under that constraint, so nobody arrived and discovered the job was harder than the advert.
Permanent and contract on the same account
Capacity in weeks where the business needed flexibility, permanent hires where it needed the role to still exist in three years. Three more searches are open on the same account today.
Ready to hire the right people
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