About Vibrant Planet and Our Mission!

We are a team of leaders in science, forestry, policy, and tech, building a cloud-based, data-driven platform to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration and reduce catastrophic wildfire, tree mortality, forest degradation, and deforestation. Our current software modernizes land management planning and monitoring with AI-driven data development, user friendly scenario building and decision support, and forest resilience trends and treatment outcome detection. The system quantifies potential and actual treatment benefits, helping to grow markets for ecosystem services (carbon, water, biodiversity, sustainable forest-derived products).

Our initial platform (launched in September 2021) is focused on temperate, “fire adapted” landscapes in California and the Western US. Our mission is global; our roadmap expands into other geographies and forest types accordingly.

Driven by our sense of urgency to protect vital forests and the services they provide, we use our expertise to build sophisticated, AI/ML-driven, user friendly products to democratize the use of data and accelerate the process of stabilizing and restoring our forests.

Vibrant Planet is backed by climate and ecosystem resilience solutions leaders, including Grantham Foundation, Earthshot, Elemental Excelerator, Ecosystem Integrity Fund, Chris Cox (CPO at FB), Neil Hunt (Former CPO of Netflix), Cisco, Valia Ventures, and Halogen Ventures.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Vibrant Planet is committed to diversity. We encourage applicants from all cultures, races, colors, religions, sexes, national or regional origins, ages, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, military, or other status protected by law to apply

We are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job. The candidate may come from a less traditional background but have capacity to grow into and thrive in the position after some mentoring. We do not require that you have experience with every job description task. We will consider any equivalent combination of knowledge, skills, education, and experience to meet minimum qualifications. We encourage each candidate to think broadly about their unique background and skill set and how it may relate to the role. This is important to us. We are not just building a business; we are cultivating a community that thrives on the strength of its differences.

For further information, please visit: https://vibrantplanet.net

About the Role

We are seeking a versatile, hands-on, data-focused software engineer to help us scale and build our geospatial pipelines and tooling. You will be part of a small team of engineers and scientists tackling some of the most important climate change-related issues facing the world today. This is a remote role (and company), so working comfortably and effectively in a distributed team is crucial.

Key Responsibilities: Design, develop, scale, and maintain data pipelines that ingest, transform, and store large volumes of geospatial data from multiple sources.

• Be a lead resource of Geospatial Knowledge and experience on the team
• Optimize data processing, storage performance, and cost efficiency by leveraging cloud-based technologies and services.
• Collaborate with engineers, scientists, and other stakeholders to share knowledge and build expertise.
• Lead and participate in development life cycle activities like design, coding, testing, and production release.
• Contribute to our evolving engineering culture, standards, tooling, and processes.
• Mentor and support other engineers and deeply review code.

Technical Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience
• 2+ years experience in geospatial data engineering or a related field
• Writing code to process Raster and/or Vector Data
• Experience with some of the following: Geopandas, Rasterio, GDAL, PDAL, Postgres/PostGIS
• Proficiency with Python or an equivalent language. Ability to write clean, high-quality code and tests to keep our system fast, reliable, and monitorable.
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks and tools (e.g., Airflow, Hadoop, Spark)

Bonus Qualifications - Absolutely not required, but it’s a plus!

• Jupyter notebooks
• ArcGIS/QGIS
• Lidar data
• Satellite imagery

Other Expectations

• Strong communication skills; you have the ability to communicate effortlessly, discussing complex technical concepts with engineers and non-engineers.
• Collaborative and supportive team player with a desire to enrich our engineering culture.
• Eagerness to learn, think creatively, and share knowledge with others.
• Ability to write understandable, testable code with an eye toward maintainability.
• Proactive and empathetic mindset - you love to roll up your sleeves to fix problems

Location

We are a remote-first company with a majority of the team in the US west coast time zone. We also have a small and growing presence in New Zealand. Location can be flexible, but we primarily target those two time zones and anything in between. Please note that we are unable to offer H1B sponsorship for this position.