Senior Backend Engineer (Remote)

About the Role:

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team and lead the development of our core platform, which provides impactful tools and services to developers and businesses committed to combating climate change. In this role, you will be responsible for building and maintaining systems that power our platforms, AI and remote sensing insights. Your work will enable our customers to identify and support high-quality nature-based projects, driving positive environmental impact.

You'll be working alongside a team of sustainability experts, forest scientists, machine learning experts, designers, and engineers to understand stakeholder needs and deliver high-quality, delightful products. The products you’ll be creating will touch a wide range of audiences in the carbon credit and forest carbon project space from the environmentally responsible corporations and individuals to the forest projects themselves.

We're looking for engineers who find joy in the craft of building and want to make an impact. Engineers who push forward initiatives by asking great questions, cutting through ambiguity, and organizing to win. Engineers who are relentlessly detail-oriented, methodical in their approach to understanding trade-offs, place the highest emphasis on building simply, and building quickly.

Location: This role is remote. However, given the cross-functional communication responsibilities, it is preferred that you be within 3 hours of Pacific time.

About Pachama:

Pachama harnesses AI and satellite data to empower companies to confidently invest in nature. Using the latest technological advances, Pachama delivers continuous insight into how forests sequester carbon, protect wildlife and benefit local communities. These insights enable leading companies to find the world’s best projects and track their impact over time while also helping land stewards earn an income protecting nature with tools to develop carbon projects and secure funds.

What You Will Help Us With:

• Impact: Empower our interdisciplinary teams and customers to derive insights needed to originate and compare high-quality nature-based projects from our multi-TB datasets by building the systems which give access to our innovative geospatial and remote sensing technologies.
• Technical leadership and innovation: Lead cross-functional projects and connect product value across teams with core design and technologies. Develop and implement strategies and vision for our products and systems.
• Advocating for and mentoring on best practices: Mentor teammates to raise the bar across engineering teams, enabling step-level increases in efficiency.
• Hands-on contributions: Code the systems and tools that enable all engineering and science teams to produce high-quality insights for forest carbon projects, optimizing and simplifying our infrastructure to run as efficiently as possible across large amounts of data.

Experience & Skills We’re Looking For:

• Strong software engineering practices, with a background in Python, Postgres / PostGIS, and GraphQL, and some knowledge of front-end frameworks such as React / Typescript.
• Experience building scalable APIs and other system architecture using GCP, Heroku, or other cloud infrastructure and containerization tools such as Kubernetes.
• Experience leading large cross-team engineering efforts with a bias toward collaboration, transparency, great documentation, and clean, elegant, and pragmatic code.
• You don’t necessarily call yourself a full-stack engineer, but you have supported frameworks like React\Typescript and obsess over usability and the user experience.
• Comfort with fast-paced execution and rapid iteration in a startup environment.
• Passion for environmental sustainability and a desire to make a meaningful impact on the planet.

Preferred (But Not Required) Qualifications:

• Worked in distributed compute systems - you aren’t just familiar with distributed workflows but have been responsible for deploying, scaling, supporting or maintaining the infrastructure needed to run them. Our tech stack includes Dask and Flyte deployed through Kubernetes and GCP.
• Supported Data pipelines and infra ML and Scientific applications- Have worked with ML and/or Science teams previously.
• Experience in data engineering, including ingest, storage, orchestration, and compute at scale, with the ability to apply these skills to new domains like forest science and remote sensing.
• Familiarity with carbon markets.

You’ll Have The Opportunity To:

• Approach problems with curiosity and humility.
• Own solutions end-to-end.
• Take part in strategic thinking.
• Leave code better than when you found it.
• Communicate well and document better.
• Have fun and make a meaningful impact!

Even if you don’t meet all these requirements, we encourage you to apply if this job description excites you. We are looking for ambitious people to help make an impact on climate change. That purpose requires us to bring together a diverse set of people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills to create solutions that work for all.