Staff Data Engineer - Overstory

Overstory is tackling the climate crisis by enabling a resilient electrical grid. We use AI and advanced satellite imagery to pinpoint and prioritize vegetation risks, helping utilities prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate the transition to a safer, more resilient grid. Our diverse team, spanning the Americas and Europe, is united by 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 build a more resilient world.

Role & Team

As a Staff Data Engineer at Overstory, you will lead the design and scaling of our data platform, which powers our AI-driven vegetation analysis. This involves orchestrating enormous volumes of satellite imagery, model inferences, and utility network data through reliable and timely pipelines to support customer decision-making. You will own the platform's architecture and its evolution.

You will collaborate with data, ML, and product engineers, and product teams, to ensure data flowing into models and out to customers balances pragmatic delivery with durability, traceability, and scalability. As a senior technical leader, you will mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and establish standards for pipeline design, service boundaries, and data quality across Overstory.

Time zone requirement: Europe (GMT/WET, CET, EET) and Eastern North America (NST, AST, EST)

What You'll Do

In collaboration with data, ML, and product colleagues, you will:

• Architect and evolve the orchestration layer, including asset graphs, quality checks, and partitioning strategies.
• Design and maintain production data pipelines for large-scale geospatial and temporal data, from ingestion to delivery.
• Lead system design across the data platform, focusing on service boundaries, data contracts, and failure mode design.
• Drive the transition to a service-oriented architecture, decoupling components for independent team ownership and deployment.
• Build event-driven workflows using durable messaging patterns.
• Establish observability, testing, and data quality frameworks for proactive problem detection and traceability.
• Mentor engineers and define standards for building, testing, and operating data systems.

Skills & Experience

• Experience at the intersection of data engineering, distributed systems, and large-scale scientific data, with motivation to reduce wildfire risk and improve grid resilience.
• 10+ years of experience designing and building production-grade data pipelines and systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with Dagster (asset-based orchestration, partitions, sensors, production operations) or comparable experience with Airflow, Prefect, or similar.
• Proven track record building and operating data pipelines at scale, understanding idempotency, backfills, and partitioning.
• Experience preparing systems for high demand, focusing on testability and scalability.
• Strong system design skills, including reasoning about boundaries, contracts, coupling, failure modes, and explaining tradeoffs.
• Practical experience designing service-oriented architecture, including versioning and operational migrations.
• Strong Python skills and experience with Google Cloud.
• Experience with Pub/Sub and event-driven patterns.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering, ML, and product.
• Comfortable leading architectural discussions and mentoring engineers.
• Experience in remote-first and globally distributed teams.

Nice To Have

• Comfort working with geospatial data storage.
• Experience building data pipelines for ML training and inference.
• Experience with analytics engineering tooling and warehouse modeling in BigQuery.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience and comfort owning systems in production.
• Background in remote sensing, forestry, or the utility sector.

What We Offer

• Competitive, location-specific compensation and benefits.
• Flexible, autonomous, and collaborative working environment.
• Home office stipend, coworking, and ongoing education budgets.
• A company culture that embodies our core values.
• Opportunity to contribute to mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects natural resources, and addresses the climate crisis.

About Our Team

We are a fast-growing, globally distributed team of about 100 people, representing fifteen nationalities and speaking fourteen languages. We work remotely from eleven countries (United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Canada). We hold an annual in-person team gathering and offer options for occasional in-person collaboration.

Diversity & Inclusion

The climate crisis requires diverse perspectives. We value diversity and believe the best ideas emerge when people with different backgrounds and experiences collaborate. We are committed to building a team that reflects the communities we serve, upholding equitable and inclusive practices, and fostering a culture where everyone has a voice in building a sustainable future.

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 find joy in exploration.
• We’re rooted in diversity. Our resiliency comes from our differences, much like thriving ecosystems need biodiversity.
• We care for each other. We nurture each other as humans.
• Trust is fundamental. We assume the best in everyone and share ideas openly for positive impact.