Backend Software Engineer

Do you want to work for a mission-driven non-profit, writing software that will contribute to helping the livelihoods of millions of coffee farmers around the world? Enveritas is a 501(c)3 non-profit and Y Combinator-backed startup looking to hire for our Engineering & Data Group. You can learn more about this job and about our Backend and Data Engineering Team at https://www.enveritas.org/jobs/backend-software-eng/

We are looking for two backend software engineers with a focus on python and PostgreSQL to join us on a remote/global, full-time basis. Our Backend and Data Engineering Team is a four-person team (soon to be six!) and is part of our Engineering & Data Group — a quirky, talented, and humble group of about twenty with diverse backgrounds ranging from journalism to academia to international industry.

About Our Backend & Data Engineering Team

The Backend & Data Engineering Team builds software to collect, analyze, and report data about coffee farmers’ conditions and practices. This large-scale data-collection effort requires many moving parts to work together, and we use technology to support that effort at every step of the process — from identifying coffee farms in satellite imagery, to coordinating survey edits across country teams, to detecting data anomalies in real-time that can be investigated while teams are still in the field. A core part of our work is in data aggregation and report generation, with insights ultimately being shared with roasters and other stakeholders on how to assist in improving the social, economic, and environmental conditions of smallholder farmers. 

While our tooling varies across internal products, our backend services primarily use a Python/PostgreSQL stack running on Linux to run our GraphQL APIs. We use git and Github for maintaining our code, CircleCI for CI/CD, and AWS for hosting our services and static resources, with containerization where appropriate for development and deployment. We’ve begun working with Terraform.

What You’ll Be Doing

You will contribute to major feature planning and development, both independently and in collaboration with your teammates.

• Implement new features on our core platforms, Jebena and Sini. You’ll participate in long-term planning and product roadmaps, collaborate with product managers on writing specs for the team to implement, and develop features from specs. You should be comfortable collaborating with non-Engineering teams to understand their feature needs. A lion’s share of your time will be spent working with Python and PostgreSQL to add features to our internal platforms.
• Maintenance and enhancements of existing code. You’ll work with other engineers to triage and resolve incoming issues (we use Sentry). Our team also reserves Fridays for bug-fixing, resolving technical debt, and discovering/relieving pain-points for our users.
• Manage AWS services. In tandem with our Head of IT, a part of this role includes helping manage our AWS account, including reviewing our CI/CD setup and proposing ways to further automate and secure our setup, including expanding our usage of Terraform.

Qualifications

Read this first: 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 equivalent training in the principles of software engineering.
• Strong grasp of design patterns for building software that is well-encapsulated, performant, and elegant.
• Multiple years of professional experience as a backend engineer in more than one team environment, including both developing engineering specs and writing code in Python.
• Extensive experience with Python and PostgreSQL, and creating well-designed data models.
• Background developing applications that provide HTTP-based APIs.
• Familiarity with docker containers, AWS services (EC2, RDS, CloudFront), and CI/CD setups.
• Excellent communication and analytical skills.

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 that our EOR (Deel) supports, our core hours are 10am to 2pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, with team members choosing either an early start or later stop as suits them.

You should be inspired by our mission to improve the lives of smallholder coffee farmers, and have an interest in sustainability. You should have a deep empathy for users of our tools and understand the importance of supporting the work of other teams. Because operational and business needs can be ambiguous and change on a short time-scale, you should have a love for environments with uncertainty, and enjoy not only solving problems, but discovering and demystifying them.

We are a small team! You should be comfortable working both independently and as a thoughtful collaborator, sensitive to the legibility and maintainability of your code when in the hands of your teammates.

About Working With Us & Compensation

Enveritas has teams around the world: we are about 100 people spread over almost two dozen countries, and of all backgrounds, faiths, 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 $130,000 and $150,000 annually (paid semi-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 13 standard 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.
• Field visits to our Country Ops teams in coffee-growing countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

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 (but will depend on scheduling), 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.  See the hiring page at https://www.enveritas.org/jobs/backend-software-eng/ for details about each of these interviews, including links to our interview prompts as available.

• Introductory Interview (30 minutes; Google Meet; audio-only)
• First Technical Interview (60 minutes; Google Meet)
• Second Technical Interview (60-90 minutes; Google Meet)
• Manager Interview (45-60 minutes; Google Meet)

How to Apply

Please apply using our Greenhouse application form. Feel free to contact us at jobs@enveritas.org should you have any questions about the position or the interview process. Questions about this opportunity or process will not reflect negatively on your application.

We care deeply about diversity. 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.​

A few notes about our communications: We are not able to reply to messages sent to staff outside of either our application process or our jobs email address, as this is unfair to other candidates. Also, Enveritas has been made aware of fake job postings by individuals pretending to hire persons seeking employment. These individuals are looking to collect personal information about you for fraudulent purposes. All legitimate Enveritas job openings are posted under https://enveritas.org/jobs/ and all recruiting emails from Enveritas team members will come from @enveritas.org.