Behind the Circuit: Meet David Hu, Customer Engineer
At Enode, building great technology is only part of the job. Helping our customers succeed is just as important – and that’s where David Hu comes in.
David leads Enode’s technical customer-facing functions, helping our customers navigate complex energy integrations, and ensuring they can rely on our platform as they build the future of energy.
In this edition of Behind the Circuit is our series spotlighting the individuals driving Enode forward. In this edition, we talk to David about his path to climate tech, and how supports innovators solving problems at the energy frontier.
Building for builders
David’s career has always focused on one thing: helping developers create great products. Before joining Enode, he worked at companies large and small that provided tools and APIs for software engineers – from geolocation to fintech.
“I like to say my mantra is: I like to help people build things,” he explains. “I’ve worn many hats in service of that mission, from software engineering to product management to developer relations.”
No matter the title, David’s work has always had developers at the center, and that passion was clear from his very first weeks at Enode. David gathered the company for a talk on the importance of listening to developers, reminding us (with a nod to the classic meme) that our success depends on theirs.
Finding purpose at the frontier
Before he came to Enode, David worked at Stripe as an Integration Engineer, and then a Product Manager. Stripe was more than 150 times larger than Enode, a late-stage company with established processes and playbooks. So what made him trade scale for a start-up?
“As much as I loved solving unique problems in fintech, there’s a sense that everyone already knows what a "good" payment experience looks like. In climate tech, we’re working at the frontier. What is a great EV smart charging experience that works for the owner and for the grid? What happens when you add home batteries, solar inverters or smart thermostats? These are big, fascinating questions with no clear answers yet.”
David was also motivated by the opportunity to make a bigger impact on the world. “I fundamentally believe that the climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity faces. It was clear to me from the moment I interviewed with Enode that I wanted to be part of the solution."
But it was only once David joined that he realized quite how seriously everyone on the team takes it. “I’ve never worked somewhere with a higher sense of collective mission – grounded in the belief that everything we do matters and makes a difference.”
Ownership, problem-solving and customer impact
At Enode, David leads our technical customer-facing functions, including support and customer engineering. His work is all about making sure our partners succeed, – whether that means unblocking technical issues, scaling integration support, or improving our internal tools.
“Support for our customers is mission-critical. Our support surface is huge – Enode Connect works with over 1,000 different energy devices, and that number is growing. It’s an exciting, high-leverage space that involves everything from low-level engineering details, to our product abstractions, to getting super deep on how the devices we support actually work.”
Customer support takes many forms, but one of the main ones is via the support portal. It’s here that Enode’s collective sense of ownership over customer outcomes really shines. Engineers, PMs and commercial team members all pitch in: “it’s awesome to see the whole team jump into our support queue to contribute their unique expertise,” says David.
Enode’s culture of ownership and problem-solving resonates with David. “If something’s important and no one else is addressing it – you step up. That mentality of ‘looking beyond your job description’ is highly encouraged here. You won’t get blocked by layers of process like you might at a bigger company.”
These examples of ownership range from the tiny to the company-changing: from our CTO making tweaks to internal tools to David leading a group of software engineers to build an incident management system from scratch.
Right now, all hands are on deck for AI. “I feel like I blink and there’s a new AI experiment that someone has introduced. I’m super excited to see how many people across the company are starting to think of ways to apply AI to our support experience.”
Scaling support for a fast-growing platform
One of David’s key focus areas is scaling our support operations as Enode grows. He’s already building the foundations, with better internal tools, clearer processes, and a dedicated technical operations function.
Now, David’s looking for the right person to join as a founding Technical Operations Engineer. “There’s a huge greenfield opportunity to design how we support customers as we scale. We’re looking for someone who’s excited to build processes and tools from scratch, and who wants to get close to the product and our customers.”
His advice to prospective colleagues?
“You have to have an innate drive to roll up your sleeves and solve problems. “It’s a hands-on space. One moment you might be trawling through logs to hunt down a new edge case; the next, you might be building new internal tools to make triaging and debugging faster. If you’re really lucky, you get to rent a Porsche for a week to reproduce live issues!”
If that sounds like you, check out our careers page – we’d love to hear from you.
