Staff Data Engineer

Who we are.Pachama is a mission-driven company looking to restore nature to help address climate change. Pachama brings the latest technology in remote sensing and AI to the world of forest carbon in order to enable forest conservation and restoration to scale. Pachama’s core technology harnesses satellite imaging with artificial intelligence to measure carbon captured in forests. Through the Pachama marketplace, responsible companies and individuals can connect with carbon credits from projects that are protecting and restoring forests worldwide.
We are backed by mission-aligned investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Amazon Climate Fund, Chris Sacca, Saltwater Ventures, and Paul Graham.
Recent press:Pachama is #1 most innovative AI company Jeff Bezos’ Last Shareholder UpdatePachama to monitor and manage Mercado Libre forest projects

We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to lead development of cutting-edge data systems backing our products for our mission to restore and protect the planet’s forests. As a leader on the DMRV (Digital measurement, reporting, and verification) team, you will build, scale and deploy systems for ingesting, storing and computing the data powering our AI and Remote Sensing insights which delivered it to our customers enable them to identify and originate the highest quality nature based projects.A typical day includes collaborating across engineering and science teams to understand new dataset ingest pathways for model or algorithm features, writing code to support efficient compute and scalable transformation and algorithms to unlock insights over geospatial data, designing systems for easy data access and experimentation pathways, pair coding with other engineers to raise the standards and bar on our technical work, and roadmapping core improvements to our data, compute or measurement stack.We’re looking for engineers who find joy in the craft of building but live for seeing the end to end impact and want to rally engineers around them. 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, and building quickly.

Location:This role is remote. However, being within 3 hours of Pacific time is preferred for this role given cross-functional communication responsibilities.

What You Will Help Us With:

• Impact: Empower our interdisciplinary team and customers to derive insights needed to originate high quality nature based projects from our multi-TB datasets by building the ingest pipelines, access and compute supporting our geospatial and remote sensing data powering our products.
• Technical leadershipand innovation: for cross-functional projects as our data and compute pipelines are core platform assets used across teams. Connect product value across teams with the core design and technologies available to develop strategies and vision for the data systems we need to build and how we build them. You will work with teams to implement this vision.
• Advocating for and mentoring on best practices: applied to our data pipelines and compute. Mentoring teammates to raise the bar across the engineering teams to enable step-level increases in efficiency.
• Hands on contributions: coding the systems and tools that enable all engineering and science to produce high-quality insight for forest carbon projects and optimizing methods to run efficiently on large amounts of geospatial and remote sensing data.

Experience & Skills We’re Looking For:

• Experience leading larger cross-team engineering efforts
• Experience with data engineering including ingest, storage, orchestration and compute at scale with an ability to apply these skills to new domains like forest science and remote sensing.
• Strong software engineering practices and a background in Python programming, debugging/profiling, and version control and system design.
• Distributed Compute – familiarity with distributed compute technologies and knowledge of distributed systems concepts (like CPU/GPU interactions/transfers, latency/throughput bottlenecks, pipelining/multiprocessing) Our tech stack includes Dask and Flyte
• Comfort with fast pace execution and rapid iteration startup environment. Excited by product impact.
• Passion for environmental sustainability and a desire to make a meaningful impact on the planet.

Preferred (but not Required) Qualifications:

• Geospatial – familiarity with raster and vector data, nuances of geospatial data and common geospatial cloud-native data formats (geopackage, flatgeobuf, cloud-optimized geotiff). Our tech stack includes Zarr, Rasterio, Geopandas, and Xarray
• Data for ML application- Have worked with ML teams previously.

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.