Company details

HEADCOUNT

25-99

ORG TYPE

Startup

SECTOR

Energy & Climate

WEBSITE

Hydrogrid

About the company

Hydrogrid builds software for real-time water management and production planning for hydropower operators, combining forecasting, operational constraints, and optimisation in one platform. The company describes Hydrogrid Insight as a tool that helps plants react quickly to changing weather and power market conditions. Hydrogrid was founded in 2016 and has raised a Series A round to fund international expansion. Public materials position the work as climate-tech with a heavy mix of software engineering, data, and energy-market context.

Locations and presence

Hydrogrid is headquartered in Vienna, Austria, and job and company pages consistently anchor roles there. Public company updates and role materials also describe customer activity across multiple countries, which suggests a Vienna core with international deployments.

Palpable Score

57.4

/ 100

Hydrogrid looks like a solid small-company environment for someone who already has relevant skills and wants climate impact, but the visible “first job” pipeline is thin. The biggest limiter is entry-level access: the public job board is light on 0–3 year roles, and early-career outcomes are hard to verify beyond review-site sentiment.

Pillar 1: Early-career access

Score

9.0

/ 20

The company’s public careers page currently funnels candidates to a single “General Application” entry rather than listing a spread of junior, associate, or intern roles.
Hydrogrid’s externally mirrored openings over the last year skew senior, including Senior Backend Developer roles with 6+ years of experience requirements.
The company offers full-time or part-time employment options in the general application listing, but that is not the same as repeatedly hiring 0–3 year talent into defined scopes.

Pillar 2: Hiring fairness and transparency

Score

11.7

/ 20

The company uses a standard ATS flow (Personio) with a clear data privacy statement link, which is a basic fairness signal versus informal inbox hiring.
Hydrogrid’s senior engineering job descriptions spell out concrete tooling and responsibilities (Python services, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes), which helps candidates understand expectations.
The company does not publish a consistent interview timeline, assessment expectations, or candidate communication commitments on the careers site, so process transparency stops early.

Pillar 3: Learning and support

Score

12.3

/ 20

The company’s careers page explicitly points to flexibility and “Growth” as cultural themes, including home office options and flex time.
Hydrogrid’s engineering role materials talk about “development sparring with colleagues” and knowledge-sharing expectations, which is a real coaching-adjacent signal even though the role is senior.
The company’s review-site sub-scores suggest career development is an area to improve, and Hydrogrid does not publish a repeatable junior onboarding or mentorship model.

Pillar 4: Pay fairness and stability

Score

12.7

/ 20

The company’s “General Application” listing is for a permanent employee role, and it explicitly allows full-time or part-time, which supports early-career stability when a role is offered.
Hydrogrid’s careers page highlights a free public transport pass alongside flexibility benefits, which is a practical cost-of-living support in Vienna.
The company does not consistently publish salary ranges for roles, so pay fairness cannot be checked job-by-job and the score is capped by missing pay evidence.

Pillar 5: Early-career outcomes

Score

11.7

/ 20

The company has strong overall employer sentiment on kununu, including high overall ratings and a high recommendation share, which is a positive retention proxy.
Hydrogrid’s review breakdown shows career and training scoring lower than culture and working environment, which points to uneven progression clarity as the company scales.
The company does not publish early-career outcomes such as promotion timelines, internal mobility examples for juniors, or retention over 12–24 months, so this pillar cannot score higher on proof.