Staff Software Engineer, Geospatial Data
Overstory
The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time—but it’s also the greatest opportunity for innovation, and a challenge we’re proud to take on. At Overstory, we’re harnessing cutting-edge technology to enable a resilient electrical grid that keeps communities thriving as our world changes.
The grid is the backbone of life as we know it. It powers hospitals, keeps food fresh, and ensures communities stay connected. But extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and growing wildfire risks are putting this critical system under pressure. All of this combined makes the electric utility industry the greatest opportunity for tackling climate change.
One of the leading causes of catastrophic wildfires and power outages? Trees and brush coming into contact with power lines.
That’s where we help. At Overstory, we use AI and advanced satellite imagery to pinpoint and prioritize vegetation risks before they materialize. By giving utilities critical analysis on those risks, we’re helping prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate the transition to a safer, more resilient grid.
Our team spans the Americas and Europe, and we work with utility partners across the Americas and beyond. We’re outdoor enthusiasts, musicians, artists, athletes, parents, and adventurers—15 nationalities strong and growing. What unites us is a passion for solving complex problems, a commitment to climate action, and the belief that technology should be a force for good.
Join us to help us build a more resilient world together.
The role
As a Staff Engineer, you will lead the development across teams that own core geospatial products and internal data-processing and annotation tools at Overstory. Your breadth of skills will allow you to set a technical vision for the development of the web applications, ETL pipelines, and backend services owned by these teams.
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).
You’ll lead by example and mentor other engineers to follow good practices regarding software development, system design, team processes, QA and project management.
You’ll routinely be involved in other teams’ projects to leverage or enable their own products by giving them access to timely and quality data. You would also occasionally meet with customers to understand their technical needs regarding prospective features.
This role will start off being primarily team scoped solving critical scaling challenges. There is scope to expand remit as we grow.
What you’ll do
- Explore best practices to combine coding agents with software craftsmanship and teach other engineers these practices
- Optimize the orchestration of several object detection and image alignment models
- Design and maintain robust data and feature pipelines for millions of geospatial entities
- Set the technical vision for the development of our internal annotation and QA web applications
- Work closely with your Product Manager to discover and propose new products to solve use cases such as anticipating the impact of an outage at a particular locatio
About you
- You love working in a remote-first, fast-moving environment where collaboration and adaptability are essential.
- You are based in Europe (CET, GMT) or Eastern Time (ET) zone (US or Canada) to support teammates both in Europe and on the West Coast
- 7+ years of experience as a Senior or Staff Engineer, Tech Lead, Architect or Engineering Manager
- Strong background building and maintaining scalable web-applications with React, FastAPI, PostgreSQL
- Track record of leading architectural discussions and mentoring other engineers.
- Experience with orchestrating and monitoring ML systems in production
- Skilled in designing ETL pipelines with near-real-time orchestration
- Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to various audience
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with the Geospatial ecosystem such as PostGIS, or Deck.GL
- Experience with Dagster, Airflow or similar orchestration frameworks
- Experience with XP practices such as TDD or trunk based development. The team would be new to these practices
- Experience with building web-applications tailored for repeatable human or agentic workflows
- Experience working in B2B, in particular with electrical utilities
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 100 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from eleven 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, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, 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, Cantonese, Estonian, Danish 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.
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Use of AI in Our Hiring Process
We sometimes use AI tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as helping us manage applications more efficiently or ensuring job descriptions are clear and inclusive. But don’t worry, all hiring decisions are always made by people, not machines. Any data processed by AI is handled securely in line with GDPR and our Privacy Notice.