Highlighted company: Pod

Every day, the chargers Pod has installed in the UK power more than 5 million miles of driving. There are over 250,000 of them, in homes, workplaces and supermarket car parks.

That is why the engineering is interesting. Pod is not writing software that renders a page. It is writing software that talks to hundreds of thousands of physical machines plugged into the grid.

Who Pod are

Founded in London in 2009 by Erik Fairbairn and Peter Hiscocks, originally as Infracharge. Their first public chargepoint, a unit with two sockets, called the POD Point, gave the company its name.

They rebranded from Pod Point to Pod in May 2025, alongside Pod Drive, which they describe as the UK's first home EV charging subscription. Pod Point survives as the hardware brand, so a Pod Point charger is still a Pod Point charger. The company is Pod.

They listed on the London Stock Exchange in November 2021 and were taken private by EDF, who already held 53%, in August 2025. EDF is the UK's biggest generator of zero carbon electricity. In May 2026 Pod bought EO Charging out of administration, adding fleet and depot charging and customers including Amazon, DHL and Tesco.

They are the market leader in UK home charging. In 2023 alone they delivered 448 million kWh, avoiding around 399,000 tonnes of CO2e. Their mission is powering the life we love, without costing the earth, and their three values are Truth, Edge and Care. Truth is shorthand for doing what's right, not what's easy.

How they perform on cord

The numbers below are from cord, on 3 September 2026.

• Six live roles, across engineering, embedded and product.

• 67 conversations started in the last 30 days. 50 of those in the last 15 days, and 16 in the last week.

• 108 conversations started by their team across their time on cord.

• Six of six roles publish a salary band. They are a Sector Champion for We Show The Salary and they behave like it.

• Two people on the account, running all of it.

Six roles and 67 conversations in a month is a lot of ground covered by two recruiters. Pod has around 130 to 140 people in tech, so this is a small talent team hiring into a team that already exists rather than building one from nothing.

Why engineers stay once they get there

Pod do not claim to have always got this right, and that is what makes the recognition worth something.

They were named the 21st best workplace in the UK this year. At the 2026 Inspiring Workplaces Awards in May they ranked 21st overall, made the top five among employers of their size, and were commended for Leadership. One judge called it one of the most compelling transformation stories they had read. Another described an inspiring story of organisational recovery, with a clear sense of honesty about the challenges faced and the progress being made. In April 2026 they also took Most Mission-Driven Company at the Flexa Awards, and their employee scores, verified by Flexa in March 2026, were 97% for a supporting and collaborative culture, 96% for working flexibility and 96% for inspiring leadership.

Flexibility with actual numbers. Hybrid means between one and three days a week in the London office depending on the role, and some engineering roles are advertised fully remote, with the office there if you want it. On top of that, 20 days a year of work from anywhere, and eight flexible bank holidays you can swap for whatever you actually observe. That policy came from BELONG, their employee network, rather than from the top.

Engineering with real domain ownership. The backend is Go, and their job ads are specific about wanting idiomatic Go rather than patterns ported in from other languages. There is TypeScript and Node.js in places, running on AWS with Terraform and an event driven architecture. The embedded and IoT side works to OCPP, MQTT, IEC 61851 and ISO 15118. Their connectivity squad owns the pipeline that receives and processes messages from hundreds of thousands of charging stations in the field, with all the unpredictable behaviour of the real world that implies. There is a separate Grid team. Since May 2025 the company has planned its work in cycles of 13 weeks, with teams that span every function.

They are sane about AI. Their job specs expect engineers to use the tools while keeping ownership of technical decisions, code quality and system understanding. Not a mandate, not a ban.

The rest of it. 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, a 4.5% matched pension, life insurance at four times salary, electric car salary sacrifice, and the Unmind mental health platform for you plus up to five friends or family. Their leave policies cover baby loss for both parents, fertility treatment, carer's leave, and health issues more commonly experienced by women. They are a Disability Confident employer, a founding partner of Global Women in EV Day, and a signatory of the 49 Collective Charter.

The team doing the hiring

Two people, and between them they have started 108 conversations with engineers on cord.

• Dean Jennings, Talent Manager. 65 conversations. Dean joined Pod in January 2026 to lead talent acquisition, and is the named contact on the Go and engineering management roles.

• Francesca Rodrigues, Talent Acquisition Partner. 43 conversations, and the named contact on the Node.js and embedded roles.

Highlighted Companies is a series of hand picked companies on cord. Data sourced from cord, September 2026.