Data Engineer

Welcome to Perennial.

Perennial is building the world’s leading verification platform for soil-based carbon removal. Our vision is to unlock soil as the world’s largest carbon sink. To do that, we are building trusted standards, tools, and technologies to help verify climate-smart agriculture.

Perennial uses the world’s most advanced remote measurement technology for soil carbon sequestration and emissions. We fuse machine learning, ground observations, and satellite data to map soil carbon and land-based GHG emissions at continent-level scales. This technology is powering the future of climate-smart agriculture and helping the food supply chain decarbonize.

At Perennial, you will work in a mission-driven and collaborative environment alongside a diverse team with backgrounds spanning science, technology, carbon markets, and agriculture.

Our offices are located in Boulder, CO USA and Adelaide, SA Australia. We are a fully-flexible company for remote and hybrid work.

We’ve received $25M+ in funding from mission-aligned investors including Temasek, Bloomberg, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, SineWave Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, and Collaborative Fund.

About the Role:

As a Data Engineer, you will be responsible for expanding and maintaining the core customer databases, pipelines, and API services which power our platform. You will work with a variety of data sources (tabular, geospatial, and others) and access patterns to build robust tools for ingesting and accessing data in a SQL (PostGIS) environment. You will engage in cross-disciplinary collaboration across Engineering, Data Science, and Operations to ensure that the data models you develop fulfill a variety of use cases. You will expand your work across a variety of backend services for an Enterprise-facing SaaS platform powering climate-smart agriculture.

What You'll Own:

• Own maintenance and development of core customer and geospatial SQL databases.
• Propose and implement new data models and architectures based on evolving customer and internal needs.
• Interact with Data Science, Machine Learning and Web Platform teams to determine optimal architecture
• Develop robust, scalable APIs and access patterns on top of these databases and other data stores within the company.
• Contribute to data pipelines and orchestration across the stack. 

What You'll Bring:

• 3+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Expertise in SQL database administration (esp. PostgreSQL and PostGIS).
• Strong Python programming skills (esp. SQLAlchemy or GeoAlchemy2).
• Experience provisioning and maintaining RDS/Aurora databases.
• Understanding of CI/CD principles for SQL databases (TDD, development environments, version control).
• Familiarity with data pipelines, ETL, and/or orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow, Dagster, Step Functions, SQS, etc.).
• Proactive testing mindset. 
• Strong understanding of security, data governance, and data integrity especially for enterprise clients.
• Ability to make decisions, weigh tradeoffs, and act with autonomy in a small team environment.

What will make you stand out:

• 5+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Strong Python-specific backend engineering skills (API development, Flask, Serverless, etc.).
• Understanding of geospatial vector data.
• Prior experience developing, documenting, and deploying REST APIs or GraphQL APIs for internal and end customer use.
• AWS full-stack skills (S3, Lambda, API Gateway, Route 53, cloud administration, etc.).
• Familiarity with NoSQL and/or graph databases.
• Familiarity with Docker/Kubernetes. 
• Experience working with agriculture-specific or scientific data streams (field boundaries, user data, farm equipment/IoT integrations, etc.).

Our Stack: Python, React, sklearn, Docker, Airflow, PostGIS, GDAL, AWS

You’ll love working at Perennial because:

• We live by our Core Values.
  • Speak your truths, welcome new voices.
  • Celebrate your successes, own your mistakes.
  • Solve important problems.
  • Invest in each other.
  • Build for the future.
  • Get your hands dirty!

• We challenge the status quo. We’re a group of people who want to create the changes we hope to see in the world. See some of our recent press about the problems we’re committed to solving. 

• We invest in your life. We want to provide you with resources to meet your needs both in and outside of work. We offer generous PTO, health, vision, dental, 401k, and HSA benefits and a fully stocked kitchen to keep your mind sharp throughout the day.

• We want you to grow. We are a team that supports each others’ professional and intellectual growth. You’ll have access to regular opportunities to learn from teammates and invest in your professional development.

• We offer competitive compensation packages. Our team is our most valuable asset. We want everyone who works for us to feel fairly compensated for the impact they bring to our mission. The team member in this role can expect a starting salary in the range of $100,000-$150,000 alongside equity in the company.

• Perennial is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate and embrace diversity and are committed to building a team that represents a variety of experiences, backgrounds, and skills. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin, veteran status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.