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Staff Software Engineer (Applied Machine Learning)
Pachama
Software Engineering
Remote
Posted on Thursday, October 26, 2023
The Role:
We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead development of cutting-edge systems for our mission to restore and protect the planet's forests. As a leader on the Protocol team, you will build, scale and deploy AI and Remote Sensing technology to our customers so that they can identify and originate the highest quality nature based projects.
A typical day includes collaborating with product and scientists to understand new measurements or models’ business value and complexity, writing code to design a new model or productionize new methods with remote sensing data, designing experiments to validate performance, 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.
Who We Are:
Pachama is a technology company on a mission to restore nature to solve climate change. Harnessing the latest advancements in satellite imagery, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence, Pachama evaluates the carbon stored in our forests and monitors forest growth over time. Pachama has two distinct pathways to help brands meet their climate targets today and create long-term strategies for the future. With Pachama Verified projects, companies can invest in existing high-quality forest conservation and restoration projects vetted by Pachama’s rigorous evaluation process. Through Pachama Originals, companies can start projects from the ground up, making catalytic investments in the next generation of tech-enabled forest carbon projects.
What You Will Help Us With:
- Impact: Building and releasing new algorithms and tools to enable customers to identify and originate the highest quality nature based projects.
- Technical leadership for cross-functional projects. Connect product value with scientific complexity and rigor to develop strategies and vision for the models we need to build and how we build them. Working with teams to implement this vision.
- Innovating by driving core design and ideation of new systems, models and data to leverage to measure the impact of conservation and reforestation projects
- Hands on contributions coding the systems and tools that enable research and operations to produce high-quality performance metrics for forest carbon projects. Optimizing methods to run efficiently on large amounts of geospatial and remote sensing data.
- Designing statistical frameworks and experiments to assess the quality of these measurements and models on real-world data. The quality of model outputs directly impacts the quality of forest carbon projects.
- Advocating for and mentoring on best practices applied to our AI and data science work. Mentoring teammates to raise the bar across the Protocol teams to enable step-level increases in efficiency, correctness, accuracy, reliability.
- Clearly communicating the impact and learnings from our deep tech crossfunctionally so organizationally we understand how AI and remote sensing can help us find and design better projects.
Experience & Skills We're Looking For:
- Experience tech leading larger cross-team engineering efforts
- Experience with Machine learning and statistics 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. Some examples of tools in our tech stack include Kubernetes, Dask, Flyte. Open source geospatial tools that are also part of our tech stack include Rasterio, Geopandas, and Xarray.
- Experience working in cluster environments and an understanding of the related distributed systems concepts (CPU/GPU interactions/transfers, latency/throughput bottlenecks, pipelining/multiprocessing, etc).
- Ability to find and synthesize related academic literature to apply these learnings to model and experiment design.
- 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
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.