Backend Software Engineer

About Enveritas

Do you want to work for a mission-driven non-profit, writing software that will contribute to helping millions of coffee farmers out of poverty? Enveritas is a 501(c)3 non-profit and Y Combinator-backed startup looking to hire for our Engineering Team. We have teams around the world: we are about 65 people spread over almost two dozen countries, and of all backgrounds and identities.

We care deeply about diversity. Our work is complex and nuanced, so the more diversity we have in the voices working on our problems, the larger of an impact our work can have for the world. Enveritas is an Equal Opportunity Employer ​encouraging an inclusive and diverse workforce. We embrace and celebrate the unique experiences, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds that each individual brings to the workplace. We are dedicated to hiring employees who reflect the communities we serve and strongly encourage qualified candidates from all backgrounds to apply.​

The Position

We are looking for a backend software engineer with a focus on python and PostgreSQL to join our Core Engineering Team on a remote, full-time basis. Our Core Engineering Team is a five-person team (soon to be seven!) and is part of our Engineering & Data Group — a quirky, talented, and humble group of about twenty with diverse backgrounds ranging from journalism to academia to international industry. While our current core engineering team is primarily located in the United States, we’re open to candidates located almost anywhere.

About Our Core Engineering Team

The Core Engineering Team builds software to collect, analyze, and report data about coffee farmers’ conditions and practices. This large-scale data-collection effort requires many moving parts to work together, and we use technology to support that effort at every step of the process — from identifying coffee farms in satellite imagery, to coordinating survey edits across country teams, to detecting data anomalies in real-time that can be investigated while teams are still in the field. Our work supports our Operations Teams in authoring surveys and deploying surveyors, our Data Team in analyzing field data, and our Partnerships and Data Visualization Teams in creating clear insights for our clients.

While our tooling varies across internal products, our backend services primarily use a Python/PostgreSQL stack running on Linux to run our GraphQL APIs. We use git and Github for maintaining our code, CircleCI for CI/CD, and AWS for hosting our services and static resources, with containerization where appropriate for development and deployment.

What You’ll Be Doing

• As a member of the core engineering team, you will contribute to major feature planning and development, both independently and in collaboration with your teammates.
• Implement new features on our core platforms, Jebena and Sini. You’ll participate in long-term planning and product roadmaps, collaborate on writing specs for the team to implement, and develop features from specs. You should be comfortable collaborating with non-Engineering teams to understand their feature needs. A lion’s share of your time will be spent working with Python and PostgreSQL to add features to our internal platforms.
• Maintenance and enhancements of existing code. You’ll work with other engineers to triage and resolve incoming issues (we use Sentry). Our team also reserves Fridays for bug-fixing, resolving technical debt, and discovering/relieving pain-points for our users.
• Manage AWS services. In tandem with our Head of IT, a minor part of this role includes helping manage our AWS account, including reviewing our CI/CD setup and proposing ways to further automate and secure our setup. (We primarily use ECS and RDS.)

Requirements

Qualifications

• Read this first: research shows that people of different backgrounds read job postings differently. If you don’t think you meet all of the qualifications but do think you’d be a great match for us, please consider applying and sharing more in your cover letter. We’d love to talk with you to see what skills you can bring to our team. This said, we are most likely to be interested in your candidacy if you can demonstrate the majority of the qualifications listed below:
• A degree in computer science, or equivalent training in the principles of software engineering.
• Strong grasp of design patterns for building software that is well-encapsulated, performant, and elegant.
• Multiple years of professional experience as a backend engineer in a team environment, including both developing specs and writing code in Python.
• Extensive experience with Python and PostgreSQL, and creating well-designed data models.
• Background developing applications that provide HTTP-based APIs.
• Familiarity with docker containers, AWS services (EC2, RDS, CloudFront), and CI/CD setups.
• Excellent communication and analytical skills.

Who You Are

• While you can be located anywhere, our core hours are 10am to 2pm Eastern Time (currently UTC -4) Monday through Friday, with team members choosing either an early start or later stop as suits them. (We do have occasional meetings outside our core hours, but keep those to a minimum and share notes for those who can't attend.)
• You should be inspired by our mission to improve the lives of smallholder coffee farmers, and have an interest in sustainability. You should have a deep empathy for users of our tools and understand the importance of supporting the work of other teams. Because operational and business needs can be ambiguous and change on a short time-scale, you should have a love for environments with uncertainty, and enjoy not only solving problems, but discovering and demystifying them.
• We are a small team! You should be comfortable working both independently and as a thoughtful collaborator, sensitive to the legibility and maintainability of your code when in the hands of your teammates.

Our Hiring Process

We are committed to fair and equitable hiring. To honor this commitment, we are being transparent about our interview process. We are interested in learning what working with you would be like and believe the below is the fairest method for us to see you at your best — and for you to learn about us! If you feel that a different method would be better for us to learn what working together would be like, please tell us in your application.

After your introductory interview, we expect your interview process to take three to four weeks (but will depend on scheduling), and consist of four conversations that total about five hours of time. You should plan to also spend about four hours in total preparing for interviews. See the hiring page at https://www.enveritas.org/jobs/frontend-software-eng/ for details about each of these interviews, including links to our interview prompts as available

• Introductory Interview (30 minutes; Google Meet; audio-only)
• First Technical Interview (60-90 minutes; Google Meet)
• Second Technical Interview (60-90 minutes; Google Meet)
• Manager Interview (45 minutes; Google Meet)

Feel free to contact us at jobs@enveritas.org should you have any questions about the position or the interview process. Questions about this opportunity or process will not reflect negatively on your application.

Benefits

For a US-Based hire, full benefits include 401k with matching contributions, Medical/Dental/Vision, and Flexible Spending Account (FSA), 4 weeks vacation in addition to 12 standard holidays, and personal/sick time.

For a hire outside the US, our offer will be competitive; the specific benefits and compensation details will vary as required to account for your region’s laws and requirements. Salary for each position will be paid in relevant local currency.

For all staff, we are able to offer:

• Annual education budget for conferences, books, and other professional development opportunities.
• Annual all-company retreat (as Covid and other travel restrictions allow).
• Field visits to our Country Ops teams in coffee-growing countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.