Allen Institute for AI
Who You Are:
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!
Your Next Challenge:
The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) is looking for our next Backend Software Architect to help drive our Applied Science & Technology team’s EarthRanger project. EarthRanger is a software solution that helps conservationists make informed operational decisions. We help prevent the poaching of endangered species, fight deforestation, promote human-wildlife coexistence, and advocate for legal protection of wildlife. We do this by integrating real-time data from 100+ hardware sensors (animal trackers, radios, vehicles, etc), rangers, patrols, remote imaging, etc and providing visibility and analysis of conservation activities across landscapes. More than 500 conservation organizations use EarthRanger today, from iconic national parks like Masai Mara Reserve in Kenya and North Luangwa National Park in Zambia, to species-specific conservation programs like the Snow Leopard Trust in Mongolia and Panthera’s Mountain Lion Program in Washington state.
Working on this team, you have the opportunity to join us in designing, building, and deploying cutting-edge products that will have a global impact. You will collaborate with our users, NGOs, and academic partners to understand, design and deliver EarthRanger functionality to aid in wildlife conservation. In this role, applying your vast software engineering experience, you will scale and extend our platform to support tens of thousands conservation sites and programs. The candidate will be confident in the use of the latest tools and best practices, and comfortable both teaching and learning from teams of extremely talented engineers.
What you’ll need:
The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required to help us make a difference.
- Experienced software development engineer and architect with a strong agile background.
- Ability to architect scalable solutions including design documents and lead the implementation of that system by their team. Including the management and processing of near real-time data streaming from remote sensors.
- Ensure that unit tests, continuous integration, and continuous delivery are implemented as part of delivering a solution for web, web services, database, and mobile applications.
- Hands-on expertise in many disparate technologies, typically ranging from web service interfaces through to back-end systems and all points in between
- Proactively identifies potential roadblocks or performance/productivity concerns. Determines, and executes on, strategy for resolution.
- Must be delivery focused, with a strong willingness to perform all tasks required to complete the job and meet deadlines.
- Technical innovator and thought leader, with ability to demonstrate and inspire continuous learning, experimentation, and data and metrics-driven decision making
Preferred:
- Experienced coder in Python with over 4 years experience developing applications and services in that language. Version 3.8 and above.
- Technical Experience includes building and deploying SaaS applications at scale using the Django Web Framework with major data storage engines (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, ElasticSearch, etc.) Scale includes the use of multi-tenancy to support many different customers. Systems deployed on Kubernetes.
- Use of Django Rest Framework to define REST based API for a complicated system. Develop alternative APIs using web socket or socketIO to provide real-time interface.
- Realtime systems architecture, using celery, pubsub, or comparable tools to implement background jobs and message queues for cross-system communication.
- Demonstrated expertise securing an application at all levels, from data at rest through the public interface
- Experience delivering solutions on AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. Google Cloud preferred.
Education/experience:
- Established track record of delivering complex software solutions to delight customers
- Bachelor's degree and/or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience
- A minimum of 12 years of software development experience
For more details, please contact [email protected] with CV and cover letter.