Working to solve our climate crisis is the most important mission of our time, and the most exciting problem to be working on. Overstory’s mission is to help solve our climate crisis by providing real-time intelligence about the planet’s vegetation. In our first step toward this mission, we are applying machine learning to satellite imagery to track forests and vegetation, helping to reduce the risk of wildfires and power outages.
We have already proven our business model and we’re all united behind our ambitious vision to scale up this model to help humanity and the planet. We recently raised a round of funding, led by Convective Capital. Other investors include: B Capital Group, Moxxie Ventures, Capital T, Pale Blue Dot and many other climate-focussed investors.
If you want to have a real impact and solve some of the world's most complex challenges with advanced technology, come work with our talented and passionate team. Overstory is based in Amsterdam but we are a remote-first company, with people living all over the U.S. and Europe.
About the role
As a Technical Delivery Lead in Overstory, you will be responsible for defining the technical direction of delivery projects, and delivering the results of our vegetation analyses to our customers. Your focus will be to understand the needs of the customer and plan the technical work to deliver successfully and in the timeline proposed, flagging any challenges early on. To execute on your plan, you will collaborate with small teams of Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, Data Engineers, and Full-Stack Developers to implement the technical parts of the project together. You will be in sync with the Business team to make sure the tech team is delivering value to the customers, as well as communicating any struggles and challenges. You will work in an agile manner, learning from our customers, iterating quickly, and deciding when to build for a scalable future and when to hack it together.
It’s a challenging and fascinating role, with real impact on how Overstory’s customers manage vegetation at scale. You’ll be working and learning in a diverse technical team, finding ways to solve problems together using a mix of cutting edge technology and straightforward data engineering.
In detail…
You’ll spend most of your time working autonomously or within a small team, using Overstory’s latest data processing and machine learning pipelines to analyze satellite imagery sets and other geographical datasets.
We have models and pipelines at various stages of maturity and we would expect you to use and apply the results of the stable ones, and collaborate with other technical teams to enable them to improve and validate the ones still in early development.
A big part of the role is using Overstory’s product and our analyses to solve customer needs. You will work closely with our Customer Success team to understand the customers’ problems, and then work with other Technical Delivery Leads and the rest of the tech team to develop solutions to those problems.
On a typical day you could be: running a satellite image through a pipeline, checking the quality of the output, and working with a specialist team to tweak the input parameters; writing Python code to explore, process and analyze GIS data; reviewing data accuracy and finding ways to improve it; updating a technical project plan; preparing images and statistics for a customer presentation.
You will have responsibility for your own projects, and we’ll expect you to take initiative to deliver a great product to our customers, and help us improve overall. Whether the work is about forest damage detection, tree species identification or biodiversity monitoring, you are up for the challenge!
Skills
You are comfortable working with Python code and Jupyter notebooks day to day. You are familiar with GitHub, and either you already use (or are ready to learn) tools such as Slack, Miro, Notion, Google Suite.
Your written and verbal English communications skills are excellent, and you have empathy and understanding of different roles and business priorities, including for companies outside your sector. You have diverse and rich experiences communicating with both deeply technical and specialist colleagues, and with sales, business and customer success teams, and directly with customers.
You manage your own time effectively, across multiple projects and occasionally under pressure, able to prioritize short and long term activities with a strategic approach.
You have strong attention to detail, and be well organized, keeping many files in the right places, and clear documentation up-to-date.
You are flexible and ready and able to learn new things, and able to quickly adapt to new working practices and technologies.
Experience
You have worked in a startup environment, ideally for at least 2-3 years, or have very similar experience of dynamic, innovative work. You have experience working in an uncertain environment where there is no good or clear answer, and where you have multiple stakeholders to work with.
You have at least 3 years of commercial experience managing or leading technical projects and customer deliveries, creating and/or leading technical projects from inception through to shipping and integrating feedback.
Your experiences have given you a strong capacity to work through trade-offs, to make decisions, to prioritize, and to choose and implement practical solutions. You will face challenges with pragmatism, balancing technical and business perspectives, finding creative ways forward, and putting them into practice.
Nice to haves
- Geospatial data engineering/data science experience, or remote sensing experience
- Experience in a remote team
- Experience delivering B2B data/digital products and solutions
About you
- You are creative and curious.
- You are pragmatic, you know when a simple solution is sufficient or when new development is required
- You are a strong communicator, able to express your ideas succinctly. You make complex ideas accessible to others.
- You can talk to software engineers and data scientists, and to customers
- You have an eye for quality, your work is thorough, and you pay attention to both the small details and the larger picture.
- Teamwork is at your core, and you like to help others grow and succeed.
- Ideally, you’re in a time zone +/- 1 hour from CET.
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 38 people from all over the world. Eleven nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from eight different countries and occasionally (optionally!) meet up for in-person collaboration.
Diversity & Inclusion
We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion with regards to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, age, education, disability, disciplines and skillsets. 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 eight people on our leadership team are female or non-white males, 40% of the overall team are female and 25% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks ten languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Indonesian and Cantonese.
