Staff 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.

Your responsibilities

As a Staff Engineer, you will work within the Vegetation Management Experience team to evolve a suite of web tools that enable utility companies to more effectively manage risks associated with climate change, wildfires and storms.

We are seeking improvement in the following areas:

• Performance & Scalability: ensure that our product can handle 3x YoY growth 
• Accelerate time to value of new product capabilities
• Reduce the amount of manual work required to ingest vegetation analysis into our customer facing tools

Here at Overstory our Staff Engineers are hands-on technical leaders whose influence extends beyond their team either through leading cross team initiatives, making technology choices for critical aspects of our technology platform or solving for critical technical challenges within teams enabling our business to achieve our rapid scaling plans (growing 3x YoY). 

This role will start off being primarily team scoped solving critical scaling challenges. There is scope to expand remit as we grow.

What you will do 

Technical Skills:

• Broad and deep understanding of system design with an ability to select the correct paradigm/technology given the situation and constraints.  
• Develops a deep understanding of our business domains and how technology can be applied to drive business impact. 
• Innovates and introduces new technologies or methodologies.
• Resolves complex technical challenges with innovative solutions.

Ownership:

• Leads cross-team initiatives or leads on architectural system design at team level
• Drives pragmatic technology choices/decisions making sensible trade offs in order to  balance current and future business needs.
• Defines coding standards and engineering best practices.
• Evaluates and recommends new tools and technologies.
• Hands-on contribution 

Leadership:

• Mentors and coaches engineers.
• Influences technical decisions at the organizational level.
• Collaborates with product managers and CTO to inform how technology can influence or enable the product strategy.

About You  

• Experience of working in a high growth scaleup environment 
• Product minded and able to demonstrate significant impact you have had on a business through the application of technology
• Proven experience of full stack development across the following (or similar) technologies: React/Typescript, Python/fastAPI, Postgres DB, 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.
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to mentor and coach engineers at all levels.
• 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. Open to US ET for those that are able to have significant overlap with GMT/ CET working hours. 

If you don’t meet all of the above yet feel you have lots to offer, please apply.

Nice-to-haves

• You can demonstrate experience scaling large distributed architectures.
• You have experience in working in a remote-first environment.
• You have worked with satellite data and/or imagery.

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, 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.