Overstory
Senior Platform Engineer
Job Summary
The Senior Platform Engineer role involves designing and implementing a distributed system that supports data pipelines for geospatial and deep learning models related to climate risk and wildfire prevention. The position requires experience in backend development, system design, and cloud infrastructure like GCP and Kubernetes, with a focus on scalability and performance. The role emphasizes collaboration within a remote, diverse team and includes responsibilities for promoting best practices and reducing manual workflows. The organization is mission-driven, offering flexible work arrangements, benefits to support skill development, and a commitment to diversity and climate action.
Required Skills
Benefits
Job Description
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 Senior Platform Engineer, you will work within the Core Platform team to build the foundations of a sophisticated distributed system that enables the execution of data pipelines running geospatial algorithms and complex deep learning models to identify risks associated with climate change, wildfires and storms.
We are seeking contributions in the following areas:
- Design and implementation of the Overstory platform by contributing to the codebase with well written and tested code.
- Collaboration with other engineers to evolve the architecture of the platform.
- Supporting other engineering teams by being a platform ambassador and promoting paved paths and best practices.
- Reduce the amount of manual work required to run vegetation analysis algorithms.
At Overstory, our senior engineers are experienced individual contributors who deliver high-quality software and drive team success through effective technical decisions. They excel in balancing sophisticated solutions with practical time-to-production constraints enabling our business to achieve our rapid scaling plans (growing 3x YoY).
What you will do
Technical Skills:
- Good understanding of the DevOps practices. We operate a you build you run it approach. You will be responsible for the entire software development lifecycle.
- Aware of risks and trade-offs when building solutions, keeping in mind scalability and performance implications.
- Good understanding of system design with an ability to select the correct paradigm/technology given the situation and constraints.
- Innovate and introduce new technologies or methodologies.
- Resolve complex technical challenges with innovative solutions.
Ownership:
- Contribute to the design process for complex technical problems within the team boundaries.
- Explore opportunities for codebase of system-level improvements.
- Understand competing priorities and order them effectively.
- Define coding standards and engineering best practices.
- Evaluate new tools and technologies and make recommendations based on demonstrable justification.
About You
- Experience of working in a high growth scale-up environment
- Product minded and able to demonstrate significant impact you have had on a business through the application of technology
- Proven experience of backend development across the following (or similar) technologies: Python, Postgres DB, Redis, Data pipelines)
- Comfortable working in a build it, run it environment (GCP, cloud run, grafana, k8s) - or similar.
- Ability to design and implement scalable and resilient systems.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
- Passion for learning and staying updated with evolving technologies and industry trends.
- You are based in GMT/ CET time zone.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience working with maps/imagery/geospatial domains is beneficial but not essential.
If you don’t meet all of the above yet feel you have lots to offer, please apply anyway.
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 72 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine 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 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.
Overstory
We help electric utilities optimize resources, mitigate vegetation risk, and future-proof their operations and maintenance programs for the growing climate and market challenges of our time. This intelligence helps ops teams direct pruning efforts to minimize the risk of wildfires and power outages across their network.
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