As the Chief Technology officer (CTO) and co-founder of Charge42, you are responsible for the overall development and operations of our technology. You are an experienced IT architect, project- and team manager with a solid and hands-on past in software development. You have a proven track record in software product maturation, and you are ready to invest your energy in our game changing start up. 

Charge42 is a new spin-off of VITO, an independent Flemish research organization. Charge42 will commercialize the VITO “Smart EV Charging” technology, which optimizes the use of charging stations for electric vehicles. It is expected that the number of charging stations in companies or parking lots will exponentially grow in the following years. Their historic connection capacity is rarely sufficient to charge the many emerging electric vehicles, while fears of lack of range are causing people to demand fast charging speeds. At the same time, cheaper solar and wind energy systems are installed, together with local storage solutions. Making optimal use of those facilities requires a smart charging solution that schedules charging not only to the right amount of energy at the right time, but also at the lowest possible cost.

Charge42 will provide a B2B SaaS solution which drastically improves the performance and the use of the equipment.

The spin-off company will be located in the center of Brussels.

As CTO, you are responsible for the overall development, deployment, operations and uptime of our product

• You will report to the CEO on the overall cost and uptime of our technology.
• In the first years, you will steer an external IT service provider for the development and deployment of new features in our roadmap:
• Negotiate and follow up scope and timing of assignments
• Validate propositions regarding architecture and roadmap milestones
• Validate the delivery of new features
• Manage budget and operational costs
• Your first assignment will be the search, evaluation and selection of this external IT service provider
• You are responsible for analyzing end user and business requirements and convert this into requirements for our IT service partner
• You organize technical support for our customers with the help of our support engineer
• You will build an internal team that will eventually take over external development

• You have a degree in software engineering, computer science or similar and demonstrable relevant experience in commercial software development and implementation
• Playing, winning and having fun as a team is what drives you
• You have experience in roles such as IT architect, project and team manager
• You have experience with software modelling and software architecture
• In addition to your technical know-how, you have strong people skills and can build our own software development team
• You are familiar with object and time series databases and with software containerization
• Knowledge of electrical systems and/or the energy value chain is a strong advantage
• Knowledge of forecasting and machine learning techniques is a plus
• You work agile and autonomously
• Knowledge of the Dutch language is an advantage

But what we are especially looking for is an entrepreneur who will work together with the CEO to make Charge42 a success. 

This means that you are not afraid of hard work, at times face a bit of uncertainty and understand that this phase can be one of trial and error. In other words: you already have some entrepreneurial experience.

But you like it, and it gives you energy!

You will bring knowledge such as a broad knowledge of technologies of cloud platforms, architectures, communication protocols. You cannot know everything so also the interest and curiosity to dive further into it. It is not your intention to develop the software yourself.

Offer

• The opportunity to witness the birth of a promising business that significantly helps our society to become carbon neutral
• The chance to innovate daily in a fast-evolving sector and a new ecosystem of applications, and data protocols
• A chance to become co-founder of the start-up
• A challenging job, offering both freedom and responsibility for (s)he who is up to the task
• We will look for an office in Brussels and will build our team’s strength by seeing each other there 2-3 days per week
• You will start as a contractor for VITO until our new legal entity is founded.

See https://vito.be/en/smart-charging for more info.