Senior Software Engineer, Data Integrations

Love animals? Have you always wanted to apply your technical and creative expertise to a product that protects endangered species on a day-to-day basis? You don't have to decide between a technical career and a deeply moving, important calling. Every data connector you ship puts a new class of field hardware on the map for conservation teams – a connector for a GPS collar vendor means rangers see those animals moving in real time.

About EarthRanger: EarthRanger, a critical software solution from Ai2 (Allen Institute for AI), empowers conservationists to make informed operational decisions by integrating data from many sources to create a holistic view of their protected area. Our solution helps prevent endangered species poaching, combat deforestation, promote human-wildlife coexistence, and advocate for legal wildlife protection. Used across over 900 conservation sites worldwide – from iconic national parks like the Masai Mara Reserve in Kenya and North Luangwa National Park in Zambia to species-specific programs like the Snow Leopard Trust in Mongolia and Panthera’s Mountain Lion Program in Washington state – EarthRanger is making a global impact.

You will join the team behind Gundi, EarthRanger’s data integration platform, which connects field hardware and third-party systems – GPS collars, camera traps, drones, radios, satellite constellations – to the conservation teams that depend on them. We have a substantial backlog of data providers waiting to be connected and a mature integration framework to build in. This is a breadth role – many integrations, each a self-contained project measured in days to weeks – and engineers who master the backlog are positioned to grow into framework-level and delivery-architecture work.

We build with modern AI-assisted engineering tools – coding agents and agentic workflows are part of how we work every day – and we are looking for someone who uses them fluently to raise both the pace and the quality of what we ship.

As a Senior Software Engineer on Data Integrations, your job is to work through the provider backlog: take an unfamiliar provider, figure out how its API actually behaves (not just how the docs say it behaves), and ship a data connector that keeps working when the vendor does not. Your responsibilities will include:

• Ship Production Connectors: Build and support production integrations against third-party APIs, handling undocumented rate limits, silent breaking changes, and unusual auth flows.
• Engineer for Reliability: Apply the mechanics that make integrations dependable: idempotency, pagination and historical backfill, retries and backoff, webhook versus polling tradeoffs, and persistent state between runs.
• Map Data Carefully: Exercise sound data-mapping judgment – noticing when an identifier is not stable, a timestamp’s zone is ambiguous, or a field’s semantics do not match its name.
• Own the Backlog: Scope an unfamiliar provider, estimate the work, and deliver it – including tests and monitoring – without someone decomposing it for you.
• Operate What You Build: Monitor your integrations in production, diagnose failures, and handle the inevitable incidents where a vendor changed something without telling anyone.
• Work Directly With Vendors: Communicate clearly in writing with provider vendors – requesting API access, clarifying undocumented behavior, and reporting defects.
• Use AI-Assisted Tooling: Make hands-on daily use of modern AI-assisted development tooling (e.g. Claude Code, coding agents, agentic workflows) to move faster and raise quality, with the judgment to know where to apply it and to review its output critically.

• Experience: A minimum of 6 years of software development experience.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• Track Record: A track record of delivering complex software solutions that delight customers.
• Integration Experience: You have shipped and supported production integrations against third-party APIs – and have the war stories to prove it.
• Self-Direction: You can work autonomously against a backlog, scoping and delivering each provider end to end.
• Delivery Focus: A strong willingness to perform all tasks required to complete the job and meet deadlines.

While not strictly required, candidates with the following skills will be particularly competitive:

• Python: 3+ years developing applications and services in Python (3.10+).
• Cloud Platforms: Experience delivering solutions on Google Cloud (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub) or comparable platforms (AWS, Azure). Google Cloud preferred.
• Django & PostgreSQL: Experience with Django and PostgreSQL-backed services.
• Device & Telemetry APIs: Experience consuming device-fleet or telemetry APIs (GPS trackers, sensors, drones, radios), or working with conservation, geospatial, or IoT data.
• Distributed Processing: Experience with distributed background processing and message queues (Celery, Pub/Sub, or similar).