Staff Software Engineer

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. Imagine your cutting-edge software being used by a wildlife ranger in Africa, helping them to combat poaching, study animals, and help local communities.

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.

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 Staff Software Engineer, you will operate broadly across the EarthRanger platform and take on whichever hard problem matters most at the time. Your responsibilities will include:

• Rebuild Permissions & Authorization: Lead a ground-up rewrite of our permissions and authorization model, reshaping how access is governed and how data is securely shared across tenants and partner organizations – a foundational capability as more conservation organizations collaborate on our platform.
• Scale Our IoT Data Pipeline: Design systems that process, store, and retrieve large volumes of IoT data for analysis, handling real-time data streams from animal trackers, radios, vehicles, rangers, patrols, and remote imaging devices – ingesting and analyzing data from over 100 hardware sensors.
• Architect and Lead Delivery: Architect scalable solutions including design documents, and lead the implementation of those systems by your team.
• Set the Engineering Bar: Architect and enforce best practices for unit testing and CI/CD to support scalable, reliable delivery of web, service, database, and mobile platforms.
• Lead With AI-Assisted Engineering: 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, review its output critically, and help the team adopt these practices well.
• Anticipate Risk: Spot obstacles and performance risks early, formulating and implementing strategies to mitigate issues and maintain delivery momentum.
• Drive Technical Culture: Act as a technical innovator and thought leader, demonstrating and inspiring continuous learning, experimentation, and data and metrics-driven decision making.

• Experience: A minimum of 12 years of software development experience.
• Education: Bachelor's degree and/or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• Track Record: An established track record of delivering complex software solutions to delight customers.
• Architectural Breadth: Broad architectural expertise spanning multiple technology domains, from designing web service interfaces to engineering scalable backend systems and the integration layers that connect them.
• Systems Design: Demonstrated ability to architect scalable solutions across domains ranging from authorization and permission systems to near real-time data streaming from remote sensors.
• 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: Over 6 years developing applications and services in Python, version 3.10 and above.
• Django at Scale: A proven track record of architecting and delivering scalable SaaS solutions built with Django, using data stores such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch; skilled in designing multi-tenant systems and orchestrating deployments on Kubernetes for high availability and performance.
• API Design: Expertise designing and implementing RESTful APIs for complex systems using Django REST Framework, plus experience developing real-time communication interfaces through WebSockets or Socket.IO.
• Real-Time Architecture: Experience architecting real-time systems leveraging Celery, Pub/Sub, or similar technologies for distributed background processing and message queues.
• Application Security: Demonstrated expertise in end-to-end application security, protecting data at rest and in transit and safeguarding all public-facing interfaces.
• Authorization Models: Experience designing authorization and permission models (e.g. RBAC/ABAC, fine-grained access control) and reasoning about secure data sharing and isolation in multi-tenant systems.
• Cloud Platforms: Experience delivering solutions on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Google Cloud preferred.
• AI-Assisted Engineering Practices: A track record of establishing AI-assisted engineering practices on a team – evaluating tools, defining sensible guardrails for code review and testing, and improving team throughput without compromising the production bar.