Software Engineer / Data Systems Engineer, Data Team [REMOTE]

Do you want to work for a mission-driven non-profit, analyzing data and writing software that will contribute to helping millions of coffee farmers out of poverty? Enveritas is a 501(c)3 non-profit and Y Combinator-backed startup looking to hire for our Data Team. You can learn more about this role and our Data Team at https://www.enveritas.org/jobs/data-eng/

We are looking for a Data Software Engineer with several years of professional experience to join our Data Team on a remote, full-time basis. Our Data Team is a five-person team (soon to be six!) working from Chile, Poland, Colombia, and the United States, and is part of our Engineering & Data Group — a quirky, talented, and humble group of about sixteen with diverse backgrounds ranging from journalism to academia to international industry.

About Our Data Team

Our Data Team creates models, analysis, and visualizations to better understand our data about the climate, economic, and social conditions experienced by coffee farmers. We write code to transform raw survey data into insights that match our sustainability standards.

Our team supports our Country Operations teams by creating tools (using Google Sheets API, SQLAlchemy, Airtables, and Looker) for them to detect outliers and glean insights from our survey data. We help our Partnerships team by creating PDF documents (using Python) for delivering sustainability insights. We create statistical and descriptive models (with a soft spot for Bayesian models) to understand issues like the cost of production farmers face, and how widespread poverty is among them. And soon, we will be working with our DataViz team to create data visualizations based on Plotly’s Dash Enterprise. Our programming languages of choice are Python and SQL (we use PostgreSQL), although some of our analysis is also done in R. We use git for version control, Github for hosting our repositories, and pytest for automated testing.

What You’ll Be Doing

Building and refactoring tools to improve the efficiency of our tools for our Country Operations teams. You will identify opportunities for improving our current workflows and our codebase. This will include building automated workflows using Python and refactoring existing code for robustness and quality.

Improving the developer experience for our data analysts. You will be in charge of our Github repositories and AWS instances. This includes managing the build environments, maintaining our AWS instances, and helping us with best coding practices in code reviews.

Maintaining and upgrading our data pipeline. You will own our data pipeline / ETL and will be responsible for improving it. The pipeline is written in Python, currently runs on a single EC2 instance, and writes its output to a PostgreSQL database.

Qualifications

Research shows that people of different backgrounds read job postings differently. If you don’t think you meet all of the qualifications but do think you’d be a great match for us, please consider applying and sharing more in your cover letter. We’d love to talk with you to see what skills you can bring to our team. This said, we are most likely to be interested in your candidacy if you can demonstrate the majority of the qualifications listed below:

• A degree in computer science, or an equivalent training on the principles of software engineering.

• Multiple years of professional experience using Python and SQL in a team environment.

• Fluency with Linux and command-line tools (terminal/bash, git, cron, make).

• Excellent communication and analytical skills; flexible problem-solving attitude.

• An excitement for our mission of improving the lives of smallholder farmers and an interest in sustainability.

Who You Are:

Our team is fully distributed, so you should be comfortable with remote work. This role is a full-time individual contributor role. While you can be located anywhere, our core hours are 10am to 2pm Eastern Time (currently UTC -4) Monday through Friday, with team members choosing either an early start or later stop as suits them.

Our work is often ambiguous, so you should have a love for environments with uncertainty. Most of our work is internal facing, so our product specs are often rough. For this role, you will be the only engineer on our Data Team (and supported by engineers on our Engineering Team), so you should be comfortable working with data analysts to write software and review others’ code. You should have a deep empathy for users of our tools and understand the importance of supporting the work of other teams.

What we can offer:

Enveritas has teams around the world: we are about 65 people spread over almost two dozen countries, and of all backgrounds and identities. To learn more about working at Enveritas, see https://www.enveritas.org/jobs/

For a US-Based hire, base salary for this position will be between $125,000 and $140,000 annually (paid bi-monthly). This is a full-time exempt position. Full benefits include 401k with matching contributions, Medical/Dental/Vision, and Flexible Spending Account (FSA), 4 weeks vacation in addition to public holidays, and personal/sick time.

For a hire outside the US, our offer will be competitive; the specific benefits and compensation details will vary as required to account for your region’s laws and requirements. Salary for this position will be paid in relevant local currency.

For all staff, we are able to offer:

• Annual education budget for conferences, books, and other professional development opportunities.

• Annual all-company retreat (as Covid and other travel restrictions allow).

• Field visits to our Country Ops teams in coffee-growing countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

Application Process

• We recognize that people come with a wealth of experience and talent beyond what we list as qualifications. Your life experiences help builds core competencies and knowledge that may be transferable to our openings. Therefore, we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply to our positions.

• We will review applications on a rolling basis each week with an earliest start date of August 1st, 2022. We will start scheduling introductory interviews on July 5th. Please feel free to contact us at jobs at enveritas.org should you have any questions about the position. Questions about this opportunity or process will not reflect negatively on your application.

Interview Process

• We are committed to fair and equitable hiring. To honor this commitment, we are being transparent about our interview process. We are interested in learning what working with you would be like and believe the below is the fairest method for us to see you at your best — and for you to learn about us! If you feel that a different method would be better for us to learn what working together would be like, please tell us in your application.  After your introductory interview, we expect your interview process to take three to four weeks, and consist of four conversations that total about five hours of time. You should plan to also spend about four hours in total preparing for interviews. 

• Introductory Interview (30 minutes; audio-only Google Meet). This initial call is to answer questions you have about Enveritas and the role, and to learn about what you are looking for in your next job. We will spend time answering your questions about the team and Enveritas. We may ask you to prepare a very short review of an engineer spec doc beforehand, similar to a Github issue, so that we have something technical to discuss.

• Engineering Technical Interview (60-90 minutes; Google Meet). This will be a technical interview with one to two members of our Engineering team. For this interview, we will ask you to prepare by reviewing a Github pull request, as though you were doing a code review of a PR from a data analyst. We will also ask you for a brief architectural proposal of how you would implement a data ETL job scheduler. This interview will also give you a better understanding of the type of code you’ll be working with and the scale of our data.

• Data Team Technical Interview (60-90 minutes; Google Meet). This will be a technical interview with one to two members of our Data team. For this interview, we will ask you to prepare a python / SQL problem that we’ll review together in this conversation.

• Manager Interview (45 minutes; Google Meet). This will be an interview with one to two managers, primarily to ask any questions. about your background and work history, and to answer any questions you have about the role or Enveritas.

• Reference Check. We will ask for three references, preferably former managers or direct coworkers.

• Job Offer. Our goal is to extend an offer letter within two weeks of a final interview. In order to be fair to our existing staff, our offer will be firm; we will not change the compensation level from what we’ve listed in our job posting.

Our work is complex and nuanced, so the more diversity we have in the voices working on our problems, the larger of an impact our work can have for the world. Enveritas is an Equal Opportunity Employer ​encouraging an inclusive and diverse workforce. We embrace and celebrate the unique experiences, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds that each individual brings to the workplace. We are dedicated to hiring employees who reflect the communities we serve and strongly encourage qualified candidates from all backgrounds to apply.​

About Enveritas:   Enveritas offers a new approach to sustainability assurance for companies and farmers. We are building sustainability solutions for smallholder coffee farming communities that are currently beyond the reach of existing certification and verification approaches. At Enveritas, we have developed a rigorous, scalable, and transparent verification method. This verification is the backbone of our Responsible Sourcing platform that helps companies meet their sustainability targets by investing in the areas that need it most. 

Enveritas is a startup non-profit focused on helping 100 million people out of poverty by 2030. Founded in 2016 and fast-growing, Enveritas now operates in 26 countries and provides sustainability verification free of charge for smallholder farmers. Using leading-edge AI, Enveritas has developed innovative approaches to monitor deforestation and calculate carbon footprints in the supply chains of multinational firms. We are a fully distributed team of about 60 team members plus over 300 field staff in our partner organizations with an annual operating budget for 2021 at approximately $10M. 

Please feel free to contact us at jobs at enveritas.org should you have any questions about this position. Questions about this opportunity or process will not reflect negatively on your application.