Senior Backend Engineer, Ecoscope

We build the technology that protects the world's wildlife and wild places. Our platform — spanning EarthRanger, the Ecoscope Analysis and Reporting Platform, and the Ecoscope SDK — turns sensor and satellite data into the intelligence conservation teams use to make decisions every day. Our tools are being used to monitor and understand species, operations, and ecosystems across the world.

The Ecoscope product suite is co-developed by EarthRanger and Wildlife Dynamics, supported by two interconnected teams:

• The Platform team maintains the shared software products and capabilities that make up Ecoscope, including a Next.js web application, an Electron desktop application, a FastAPI/Postgres backend, GCP infrastructure with secure workflow execution environments, queue-based workflow execution, an open-source SDK for workflow template developers, an open-source Python library for scientific analysis, and interfaces to a data warehouse that provides faster access to large conservation datasets.
• The Workflow team who develops and maintains client-facing workflow templates built on top of capabilities of the platform & SDK. These templates are built using the SDK and can be run in the web app, in the desktop app, or via the command line.

We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join our platform team full-time and contribute across the entire backend platform. This is a broad, high-ownership role: you'll design and build the services, data pipelines, and workflow infrastructure that power conservation analytics at scale — from the workflow execution engine and its cloud runners, through the geospatial data layer, to the APIs and SDK our users build on.

You'll work close to the mission. The systems you design help rangers respond to poaching incidents, researchers understand animal movement, and protected-area managers allocate scarce resources where they matter most.

• ‍Design, build, and operate backend services across the platform architecture — the platform SDK, including its workflow template engine, execution runners and invokers, the task registry, and the APIs that tie them together.‍
• Architect cloud systems and optimize compute — designing execution targets that run analytical workflows efficiently and cost-effectively, primarily on Google Cloud Platform.‍
• Build and scale the geospatial and movement-data pipelines at the core of Ecoscope — ingesting and processing data from EarthRanger, Google Earth Engine, MoveBank, and other sources.‍
• Drive collaboration on user-facing features and API design — working alongside Ecoscope’s frontend engineers to define APIs, build polished user experiences, and maintain consistency across our product suite.‍
• Design and tune enterprise-grade databases for large time-series and geospatial datasets — modeling, indexing, query performance, and reliability.‍
• Own security across the backend — authentication, authorization, data protection, and safe handling of sensitive conservation and location data.‍
• Design and deploy AI pipelines to build, configure and run analytics and reporting.‍
• Contribute to system design and architecture decisions — weighing trade-offs, writing design docs, and helping set technical direction with the team.‍
• Raise the bar on engineering quality — code review, testing, CI/CD, observability, and documentation in a public, open-source codebase.

Required

•  Significant professional experience as a backend or platform engineer, with a track record of shipping and operating production systems.

•  Strong Python skills — the platform is Python-first (95%+ of the codebase).

•  Hands-on experience designing cloud systems and optimizing compute, ideally on GCP (Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, or equivalents on AWS/Azure).

•  Depth in enterprise databases — relational and/or time-series/geospatial — including schema design, performance tuning, and operating databases at scale.

•  Solid grounding in application and data security — authN/authZ, secrets management, and protecting sensitive data.

•  Demonstrated ability to contribute to system design and architecture for distributed, service-oriented, or workflow-orchestration systems.

•  Experience applying AI/ML in production — building, integrating, deploying, or operating ML models or AI-powered features and pipelines.

•  Demonstrated experience with open-source development and community-based contribution — working in public codebases, engaging with contributors and users through issues and pull requests, and collaborating in the open. Our SDK and workflows are open-source, and engaging with the community is core to how we work.

•  Excellent communication and collaboration — you thrive in a low-ego, high-trust team, work seamlessly across a small group, share and receive feedback thoughtfully, and empower those around you.

•  Adept at asynchronous communication — our team spans multiple timezones, you must be able to collaborate effectively and transparently through Slack, unblocking colleagues, gathering consensus, and documenting decisions with limited real-time overlap.

•  Familiarity with modern Agile methodologies - working in sprints with standard Agile processes and ceremonies, sizing work collaboratively, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

•  A genuine passion for nature and conservation.

Nice to have

•  Experience maintaining an open-source project — reviewing external contributions, shepherding releases, and growing a contributor community.

•  Geospatial engineering experience (GeoPandas, PostGIS, Google Earth Engine, spatial indexing).

•  Workflow orchestration / pipeline systems (Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Temporal, or custom engines).

•  Infrastructure-as-code and containerized deployments (Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes).

•  Experience with modern observability platforms — instrumenting services with frameworks such as OpenTelemetry, tracking system performance and user activity.

•  Domain exposure to ecology, wildlife monitoring, remote sensing, or movement analysis.

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