Shawn Cockburn

Pod (formerly Pod Point), part of EDF

I lead the Assets team across backend and mobile. We own the device registry, commissioning pipeline and over-the-air firmware for an estate of 300,000+ connected devices.

Our installer application is the route every unit must pass through to go live. Used by third-party installers, it commissions hardware locally over BLE or Wi-Fi, making it essential to every hardware sale.

Alongside line management, I write and review production code, own architecture and technical direction, and share incident response with the team.

Key Achievements

• Reshaped an inherited team around a wider remit, promoting 3 engineers and bringing in people from elsewhere in Pod. What began as one backend domain now spans backend and mobile.
• Inherited a mobile codebase where a simple change could touch hundreds of lines across multiple files. I made the case for more capacity, gave engineers room to fix the foundations amid feature pressure, and helped introduce physical-layer mocking so we could test commissioning without the hardware.
• When the COO and VP of Software asked me to help another part of Pod improve its operations tooling, I spent 3 weeks tracing how work moved through the team and retiring tools that no longer helped. I built 2 LLM systems: one lets staff ask questions of their documentation instead of messaging team leads; the other ranks Salesforce cases with deterministic rules, using the model only for sentiment and summarisation.
• For that work, Pod's executive team chose me as the recipient of its quarterly CEO Award, citing my dedication to customer experience and my curiosity.
• Saw engineers maintaining the same code and pipelines across many repositories, and proposed bringing them into a company monorepo. I built consensus around the change, protected the migration time and moved services myself.
• Before Assets, I led Charge Data. Its charging-session data feeds customer billing and employer reimbursement, so mistakes show up on someone's invoice.

Pod

Founding engineer on the Energy Services team. We turned energy-market instructions into changed charging behaviour across live devices, then produced the evidence needed for settlement. I was promoted twice in under 3 years, then moved into management.

Key Achievements

• Built the real-time dispatch and smart control layer for a platform now controlling 100,000+ devices. I owned its DNO, Capacity and Balancing market integrations, and designed the core microservice architecture (TypeScript/NestJS/ECS) adopted across the platform. We made our first market delivery in 2023.
• That platform now powers a discounted EV tariff with EDF and a customer rewards scheme, bringing the technical work directly into products used by EV drivers.
• Started and ran Pod's first cross-functional hackathon: 25 participants and 35 attendees, including the full leadership team. It became a recurring event, and prompted the CTO and VP of Software to approach me about engineering management.
• Modernised the consumer app from legacy JavaScript and class-based React to TypeScript and hooks, rewriting its data layer to make state changes predictable and type-safe.
• Started a TypeScript and JavaScript learning community, running fortnightly sessions and mentoring engineers across teams.

Flexible.Energy

As the sole full-time engineer at an EV charging start-up, I worked across the stack from an ESP32 OCPP client in C++ to a real-time React dashboard. I also demoed the product at trade shows and drew on my photography and video background to create its marketing content.

Key Achievements

• Wrote an OCPP 1.6 charge-point management server from scratch in Node/TypeScript, then extended the ESP32 client to implement Security Profile 3 mutual TLS on both ends of the connection, meeting a tender requirement.
• Built what was then the first EV charging integration on PayByPhone's platform, letting drivers pay for parking and charging in one transaction and opening a route to market with local authorities and car park operators.
• Built a customisable React dashboard for live fleet monitoring and charge point control, backed by DynamoDB and secured with AWS Cognito.