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
We are looking for a Quality Engineering Lead who is a creative and pragmatic problem-solver. You’ll spend most of your time working autonomously or within a small team, leading quality control and assurance for Overstory’s products. This work will involve the continued development of our systems to assess accuracy using our own data, customer data, third party information where we can get it, and also field tests.
You will be shaping Overstory’s quality and accuracy strategy - figuring out how we can measure these and how we can automate or streamline how we assess our performance.
This is also a hands-on role. You will be Overstory’s first quality team member and so you’ll need to be working with the data and quality tools and metrics yourself - experimenting, improving and gathering and presenting results.
You will work closely with our remote sensing and machine learning teams to explore accuracy for new product features and models still in development. You will help these teams, and our internal tools team, to integrate quality assessments into our software and data pipelines so that, when our analysis pipelines are run, we can get a quick readout of how the results are looking. You’ll also support our business analysts in showcasing our results to customers and support our engineering and product teams in thinking about quality during explorations of potential new product features. You will help Overstory figure out what ground truth data we can access, find ways to use it to assess our analysis quality and put this all into practice.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Establishing, implementing, and maintaining quality management processes that support products in development and in production
- Measuring, analyzing, and improving quality system performance, in support of Overstory’s mission and goals
- Ensuring that the Overstory team are aware of and up-to-date with current quality / accuracy performance and future improvement potential, supporting activities across business, product and engineering teams
- Facilitating the solving of quality issues with multi-functional teams, leading analysis activities to understand systematic and specific accuracy issues, and identifying potential improvements
- Recommending initiatives and/or changes that will improve product and system quality.
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, straightforward data engineering and manual checks where appropriate.
About You
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 are curious and can find practical approaches to accuracy assessments, able to judge when a simple solution is sufficient or when new approaches or developments are required. You will face challenges with pragmatism, finding creative ways forward and putting them into practice.
You are comfortable working with Python code and Jupyter notebooks day-to-day. You are familiar with GitHub and you already use (or are ready to learn) tools such as Slack, Miro, Notion, Google Suite.
You are a strong communicator with excellent written and verbal English communications skills, 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. You make complex ideas accessible to others.
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.
Your work is thorough and you pay attention to both the small details and the larger picture. You have strong attention to detail and are well-organized, keeping clear records and 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.
Requirements
- You have at least 4 years of experience in a quality-related role.
- You have experience working on quality / accuracy in a remote sensing context (or a similar context where ground truth is not always available).
- You have at least 3 years of commercial experience supporting technical projects for customers, with involvement in technical projects through implementation, shipping and integrating customer feedback.
- 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.
Nice-to-haves
- You have worked with satellite data and / or imagery and / or GIS
- You are familiar with data pipelines and / or machine learning
- Experience in a remote team
- Experience delivering B2B data / digital products and solutions
- Experience building a quality team from scratch
- 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 34 people from all over the world. Eleven nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from seven 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 identifies as 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.
