Senior Platform Engineer

Working to solve our climate crisis is the most important mission of our time, and the most exciting problem to be working on. Overstory’s mission is to help solve our climate crisis by providing real-time intelligence about the planet’s vegetation. In our first step toward this mission, we are applying machine learning to satellite imagery to track forests and vegetation. Today, we proudly partner with 40+ leading utilities worldwide, including 4 of the top 10 US utilities, to help reduce wildfire risk and increase grid reliability to prevent power outages.

We have already proven our business model and we’re all united behind our ambitious vision to scale up this model to help humanity and the planet. We closed a $14 million Series A, led by B Capital and welcoming The Nature Conservancy to our collective of climate-minded investors. This milestone includes additional investment and continued support from Convective Capital, Semapa Next, Bentley iTwin Ventures, Pale blue dot, CapitalT, Moxxie Ventures, and Overwater Ventures 

If you want to have a real impact and solve some of the world's most complex challenges with advanced technology, come work with our talented and passionate team. Overstory is a remote-first company, with people living all over the U.S. and Europe.

The role 

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will work within the Core Platform team to build the foundations of a sophisticated distributed system that enables the execution of data pipelines running geospatial algorithms and complex deep learning models to identify risks associated with climate change, wildfires and storms.

We are seeking contributions in the following areas:

• Design and implementation of the Overstory platform by contributing to the codebase with well written and tested code.
• Collaboration with other engineers to evolve the architecture of the platform.
• Supporting other engineering teams by being a platform ambassador and promoting paved paths and best practices.
• Reduce the amount of manual work required to run vegetation analysis algorithms.

At Overstory, our senior engineers are experienced individual contributors who deliver high-quality software and drive team success through effective technical decisions. They excel in balancing sophisticated solutions with practical time-to-production constraints enabling our business to achieve our rapid scaling plans (growing 3x YoY).

What you will do

Technical Skills:

• Good understanding of the DevOps practices. We operate a you build you run it approach. You will be responsible for the entire software development lifecycle.
• Aware of risks and trade-offs when building solutions, keeping in mind scalability and performance implications.
• Good understanding of system design with an ability to select the correct paradigm/technology given the situation and constraints.  
• Innovate and introduce new technologies or methodologies.
• Resolve complex technical challenges with innovative solutions.

Ownership:

• Contribute to the design process for complex technical problems within the team boundaries.
• Explore opportunities for codebase of system-level improvements.
• Understand competing priorities and order them effectively.
• Define coding standards and engineering best practices.
• Evaluate new tools and technologies and make recommendations based on demonstrable justification.

About You  

• Experience of working in a high growth scale-up environment 
• Product minded and able to demonstrate significant impact you have had on a business through the application of technology
• Proven experience of backend development across the following (or similar) technologies: Python, Postgres DB, Redis, Data pipelines)
• Comfortable working in a build it, run it environment (GCP, cloud run, grafana, k8s) - or similar.
• Ability to design and implement scalable and resilient systems.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
• Passion for learning and staying updated with evolving technologies and industry trends.
• You are based in GMT/ CET time zone.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience working with maps/imagery/geospatial domains is beneficial but not essential. 

What you get

• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis.
• Flexible working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our work days around our lives, not the other way around.
• Other benefits like a remote working budget, an educational budget and time to develop new skills.
• To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance and respect.
• Equity and a competitive salary.

About our team

We are a group of 62 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden and Canada. 

We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.

Diversity & Inclusion

We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.

We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the nine people on our leadership team are female, 46% of the overall team are female and 20% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks fifteen languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Indonesian, Cantonese, Estonian and Korean.

Our values

Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.

We act with urgency.

Our curiosity fuels our growth.

We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.

We’re rooted in diversity.

Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.

We care for each other.

We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.

Trust is fundamental.

We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.