Who are we, and what do we do?

The Solar Monkey Story: Powering a Brighter Future

We are Solar Monkey and our story is one of integrity, innovation, passion, and dedication to a sustainable future.

Our journey

Our journey started at the Technical University of Delft, where a ragtag team of solar enthusiasts came together with a shared vision: to make solar energy accessible and efficient for everyone. We knew that to accomplish this, we needed to revolutionise the way solar businesses operate.

With relentless determination, countless hours of research and missteps, and a commitment to excellence, we developed Solar Monkey, a game-changing software solution that would redefine the solar industry.

For more, see our main About Page.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

At Solar Monkey, diversity, equity, and inclusion are the cornerstones of our company culture. We’re committed to creating a welcoming, safe space where people of all backgrounds, abilities, and experiences are valued and celebrated.

For more, see our main Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion page.

How do we work?

We combine in-person and online communication (through Basecamp & Zoom) – where it might not surprise you that the business side leans toward the former and the development team leans a bit toward the latter form of communication. This enables a very flexible working place. Nobody tells you where or when to work, trusting that you know best how to build on your own strengths. This also means that working remote or part-time remote is common. Most of our developers work a few days a week in the office and the rest from elsewhere.

We have Product Managers and a UX Designer to find out where the value lies and what is viable for the business. For new features and iterations they will team up with a (senior) developer to ensure it is feasible to build, and roughly in what time frame. We then follow Kanban to actually deliver the work. We currently have a weekly release cycle, in which we test and deploy to production. (We do envision that to become true continuous delivery in the coming year.)

Do know that nothing is set in stone, and we strive to optimize for developer friendliness. Do let us know what that would mean for you in your application!

What we offer

• Lots of impact on our product, our culture and the solar world!
• Lots of freedom in terms of when and where you work, and how you solve problems. This means we accept fully remote people, as long as you can work in reasonable overlap with our normal (Dutch) business hours. It also means options for 4-day work weeks or shifting around your schedule because the kindergarten is not helping out. (Or just because it gets too hot in the afternoon ;).
• A healthy workplace where you regularly work the number of hours you signed up for, and where you are able to get 8+ hours of sleep.
• A fun team that values long-term thinking and self-empowerment and that is eager to continuously improve.
• We’re a scale-up and can offer a competitive salary for Dutch market standards, depending on your skills and experience of course…. In addition to that we offer Stock Appreciation Rights, so that you can benefit from the growth of the company as well!
• The chance to learn exciting new things, whether that’s new patterns, picking up a different language, GIS systems or server infrastructure!
• A study budget of 4% of your base salary
• We facilitate your pension plan. (We don’t yet match your own contribution, which is something we do want to instate in the future.)
• 5% Days! A day per month or so we work on whatever we want as developers, and try out new libraries, approaches or other things.
• We can arrange a visa if you want to come to The Netherlands and fall into the “highly-skilled migrant” category.

About the job

Solar Monkey is hiring its first designer role in the product team! We aren’t completely void of some design skills, but our product needs more user experience love than we can give it at this moment. We are quickly expanding our app and want to focus on keeping it easy to use. So that is where you come in!

We are looking for someone who can incrementally improve features. Who can extract the latent needs of our customers. Someone who likes to create multiple options for a user interface and test those. You can create paper prototypes, simple click throughs or more elaborate mockups depending on the context. And you see to it that the chosen version is developed to spec.

In larger companies the UX & PO roles are usually separated over two people. However, we are smaller and feel that combining these might actually bring benefits for now, as for example Jeff Gothelf describes.

We are in the process of dividing our developers over multiple teams and splitting parts of our code base. At the moment you will probably not be strictly part of one team, but taking on different projects, at least on the UX part.

About you

You may be a Design Engineering Graduate, or a UX veteran or just intrinsically interested in developing applications that serve users. However you understand how people interact with (web-based) applications.

You are good at letting people talk, and you don’t get carried away by what they say they need, but you dig for their real problems. You know how to do user research, both exploratory and conclusive. You’ve have experience creating mockups of interfaces and testing those with people, iterating the design.

You understand that “intuitive” is a bit of a hollow term as it just means that people have seen something similar before, whereas the app you are developing might be novel. You however seek to make things simple and realise that that actually is the hardest part of it all. You can formulate a design vision and create visual concepts that adhere to that vision.

Note that we are not looking for a graphical designer. You don’t need to be very good with colours or fonts. It helps of course, but we will work with external designers to create a beautiful design system to build the components and interfaces you come up with.

You may have experience with the Product Owner part, but that is not 100% necessary. With your analytical design skills and written communication skills, it should be possible to learn to chop up work into sensible stories. Prioritisation is probably the hardest part of that responsibility, keeping a balance between delivery, product quality and developer happiness.

As you might have seen, we are start-/scale-up. This means that we are constantly working on improving our way of work and scaling up our processes. You don’t mind change and you like thinking about how we work too.

Required skills

1. Running design sessions with a variety of colleagues – developers, business or operations monkeys – and sometimes with users.
2. Drawing wireframes solutions for feature requests.
3. Being able to write a clear specification or pitch for changes.
4. Being able to manage one self and work in a structured manner.
5. You can easily communicate with all different kind of people like developers, business people and our users, some of whom can be quite computer illiterate.
6. You speak Dutch, as a big part of our user base is (still) Dutch.

Pre’s

1. Being able to work with tools like Sketch, Figma or Framer.
2. Being familiar with Domain Driven Design.
3. Having experience as a Product Owner.

How to apply

Please apply here. We’ll get back to you, promised! Degrees tell us less than code, so don’t forget to link to your social coding profile, tell us who you are, what you like to do and what gets you out of bed each morning. Introduce yourself and explain why you should join the Monkey team!