Breakthrough Energy is seeking a full-time Senior Software Engineering contractor to join the Contrails team. You will own the development and maintenance of core backend services that support the large-scale processing of global aviation data through compute-intensive numerical models. You may also, from time to time, support the development and maintenance of client-facing APIs/UIs, delivering seamless functionality and exceptional user experience.

An ideal candidate should have strong technical communication skills, a sense of product development and user-centered design, the ability to ask the right questions to scope requirements, and the comfort of owning deliverables end-to-end. You will be part of a small team of fast-moving individuals and are expected to deliver to enhance the team's effort-to-outcome ratio (design in context, manage tradeoffs, minimize complexity, etc.).

Scope of Work

• Design, implement, and maintain ETL services for the team’s “flights pipeline” – a topology of services handling the ingestion, manipulation, persistence, and serving of various meteorological, climatological, aviation, and model-output data
• Gain depth of knowledge across critical-path applications and participate in on-call duties (alerting & responding to system issues)
• Evolve code from our Research Science team into end-user products – i.e. services (backend) and interfaces (APIs and web apps)

An ideal candidate will be able to:

• Develop functional, high-quality code & simple, extensible services
• Be able to design for scale and performance - providing benchmark analyses in their design scopes
• Participate in code reviews and provide constructive feedback
• Deliver outcomes on schedule and communicate unexpected blockers early
• Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues promptly, demonstrating a proactive and results-driven approach
• Ability to context switch efficiently and adapt across code bases with heterogeneous design patterns
• Communicate technical concepts effectively to non-technical stakeholders, fostering a collaborative and cohesive work environment

Desired Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Proven track record of 5+ years of experience in software and data engineering, with a focus on technical leadership, platform development, and code maintainability
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and building high-performance, scalable systems in cloud computing environments, such as Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure, using containerized and serverless application architectures
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Java, or similar languages, with a strong understanding of software design principles, unit and integration testing, and algorithm development
• Experience building, deploying, and monitoring systems using Docker, Kubernetes & Helm
• Experience designing push-based and pull-based service topologies, specifically those using messaging brokers, across both stateful and stateless applications
• Proficiency in SQL and design patterns using RDBs and NoSQL datastores
• Ability to manage multiple priorities and adapt to changing requirements

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field
• Experience with geospatial or meteorology systems
• Experience operationalizing research code into production services, maintaining a clear separation between domain and application logic
• Familiarity with modern large-scale data processing frameworks, databases, and ETL tools