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About the job

Full Stack Data Engineer

Full time, permanent; based in Accra

About Rainforest Builder:

Rainforest Builder is an integrated nature tech company focused on developing and deploying intellectual property to restore tropical forests at landscape scale. We are on a mission to restore a million hectares of rainforest worldwide, sequestering hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2, restoring native biodiversity, and delivering equitable economic growth to our host communities.

We combine forestry industry know-how with the latest restoration science and technology to deliver the highest-quality carbon removal and biodiversity credits at scale. We source, finance and manage tropical forest restoration projects for some of the world’s biggest investors. Our first two countries of operation are Ghana and Sierra Leone.

What makes us different:

Science-led – we are building globally-leading IP in community-based rainforest restoration, applying continuous R&D in ecological and social methodologies, including big data analytics, to drive continuous improvements in the quality and durability of the projects we execute.

Biodiversity at our core – we specialise in restoring degraded land to tropical forest with indigenous species, ensuring win-wins for both large-scale carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. We measure, quantify and verify our biodiversity impact alongside carbon.

Pure-play restoration forestry teams – we execute and manage projects directly with our own specialised teams on the ground, ensuring that we can build lasting community partnerships and directly guarantee the quality of a project throughout its 30+ year lifetime. We do not believe that long-term carbon projects can be outsourced.

Deep forestry expertise – by working in partnership with major FSC certified forestry companies we apply decades of commercial forestry experience and operational processes to our projects, including nursery management, land preparation and fire protection.

Scale – we believe that restoration projects need to be professionalised and scaled up in a big way by bringing together the best expertise from around the world.

Your Role:

As a Full Stack Data Engineer, you will play a key role in building and maintaining the data pipelines that underpin our operations. You will work closely with a dynamic data science team, with a focus on developing back-end data storage solutions and linking these to information dashboards. You will work closely with Dr Simon Mills (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=v83Zi9MAAAAJ), Dr James Gilroy (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=6Bm6vCQAAAAJ), and be supported by our Scientific Advisory Board, including Professor Casey Ryan, University of Edinburgh (https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-ryan-5561571a/), and Professor David Edwards, University of Cambridge (https://www.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/staff/professor-david-edwards).

What we’re looking for:

We’re looking for someone who is ambitious and driven to achieve lasting benefits for climate, biodiversity and local communities by developing cutting-edge data solutions to support tropical forest restoration at unprecedented scale.

Your key responsibilities:

• Develop data pipelines to collect, clean and store data from a variety of sources, including longitudinal survey data and geospatial data (e.g. remote-sensing data).

• Build data dashboards that link the data we collect to end-users and provide real-time monitoring of operations

• Work closely with the data science team to deploy Machine Learning models for a range of analytical purposes

• Write clean and scalable code that follows software development best practices, contributing to building and maintaining RB codebase for data processing and analytics.

• Data cleaning: work with a wide range of structured and unstructured data to build clean, tidy, and well-documented data products.

• Produce high quality data visualisations for communicating insights internally and externally.
  

Essential qualifications:

• Graduate-level qualification (or equivalent experience) in computer science, statistics, or other quantitative science.

• At least 3 years’ industry experience since graduating

• Fluent in Python

• Experience with AWS

• Experience with Docker

• Experience building data warehousing solutions (e.g. Snowflake)

• Experience using Git or other version control software in a collaborative context

• Fluency in English (proficiency in additional languages commonly spoken in tropical West Africa is advantageous).

Desirable qualifications:

• Experience working with Kobo and/or ODK servers.

• Experience working with geospatial data and PostGIS

• Experience working with Shiny for building dashboards

• Excellent interpersonal and cross-cultural communication skills, with the ability to collaborate closely on data science tasks and present findings to a generalist audience.

• Commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace and research environment.

How to apply:

Please send a CV and a cover letter explaining your fit for the role to Simon Mills simon@rainforestbuilder.com.