[Filled] Open Position:
Software Developer

Position Summary

Climate Change AI (CCAI) empowers a large global community of innovators, practitioners, and decision-makers to accelerate responsible climate action through the use of AI, by addressing critical gaps in expertise, education, coordination, and research-to-deployment infrastructure. CCAI is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and is run by a small team of staff alongside a dedicated team of 50 volunteers hailing from five continents and bringing significant breadth and depth of expertise on both AI and climate change.

We are seeking a full-time paid Software Developer to create internal and publicly-available databases, and oversee community matching implementations to support the organization’s mission. You will join a dedicated and mission-driven team of experts, and make a substantial contribution to how the organization and the CCAI community develop.

This role will be part of a small full-time paid staff team composed of a Project Lead and a Community Manager. You will also be working closely with core team volunteers in the CCAI Communications Committee, which oversees CCAI’s website and online community platforms, as well as members of the CCAI Programs Committee, specifically, the sub-team overseeing distributed meetups and community events. The project will also receive guidance and oversight from the CCAI Executive Director.

Applicants to this position should have experience in a variety of different software development roles, spanning the application stack: devops, database schema design / data architecture, backend development, frontend development (to a lesser extent), and web scraping. Applicants should also be amenable to working in a startup-style environment.

Day-to-day communication with most team members will be virtual, as the CCAI team is distributed worldwide. We are an interdisciplinary and international team and believe that diversity, inclusion, and equity are not only fundamental to the organization but also to progress in addressing climate change as a whole.

Start date: As soon as possible (latest start date Early September)

Commitment: Full-time (40 hours/week)

Location: Remote within the United States

Eligibility: The applicant must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship, now or at any time in the future.

Salary: $130K (USD)

Duration: 1-year contract with possibility of renewal

Deadline for application: Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis

Roles and responsibilities

• Make architectural decisions about what type of database to use, where to host it, which backend technologies should wrap it, and develop any necessary devops code to build the database and manage deployments.
• Work collaboratively with stakeholders in the organization to determine the right data architecture for the database and iteratively update it.
• Build internal data engineering pipelines and automated workflows to enable data collection, community matching, and impact assessment of the organization’s activities.
• Implement automated workflows for populating the database through existing and growing resources of internal data, as well as external, publicly-available sources. Manage and maintain advanced workflow automation infrastructure related to the organization’s activities and community.
• Implement quality assessment infrastructure to enable monitoring online systems performance, as well as alignment with CCAI mission, values and goals.
• Oversee algorithmic matching implementation for connecting members in the CCAI community across multiple geographies, interests, fields of work and domains of expertise.
• Work collaboratively with others in the organization to develop any frontend UI necessary to make the database or algorithmic matching results useful to end-users.

Qualifications

Required skills:

• Demonstrated experience in database design, development, and use (e.g. SQL).
• Demonstrated experience in API design and development.
• Demonstrated experience in devops automation.
• Knowledge and experience in implementing security and privacy best practices.
• Expertise in at least one programming language (we mostly use Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, but this will be a greenfield application and you can use whichever language you feel is best).
• Ability to work independently without close supervision.
• Full professional proficiency in spoken and written English.

Preferred skills:

• Background or strong interest in climate change and/or machine learning topics.
• Frontend development and design skills.
• Experience with large-scale web scraping.
• Strong problem solving, organizational, and time-management skills, including expertise in coordinating multiple work streams and synthesizing data.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Experience and requirements:

• At least 3-4 years of work or open-source experience in related positions.

Additional Attributes

We look for the following in all CCAI team members, in addition to the role-specific requirements listed above:

• Mission alignment: Team members must be passionate about catalyzing impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning, per CCAI’s mission, goals, and guiding principles.
• Proactiveness and responsibility: Team members must be proactive and responsible to ensure our organization can run as effectively as possible.
• Attention to detail: Team members are mindful of the work that they carry out, which helps CCAI ensure high quality of its activities.
• Team ethic: Team members must be able to work productively and collaboratively with team members, and otherwise foster a collegial environment.
• Comfort working in a digital environment: CCAI’s team is based across the world, and communicates primarily using Slack and video conferencing tools. While we are happy to onboard newcomers to the particular technologies we use, team members must in general be comfortable working and collaborating in a primarily digital environment.
• Curiosity: CCAI is always embarking on new initiatives to catalyze impactful work. We encourage new ideas from within (and outside) the team!
• Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion: We are an interdisciplinary and international team and believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not only fundamental to the organization but also to progress in addressing climate change as a whole. Team members are expected to hold DEI as a central consideration when organizing and executing CCAI activities.

About CCAI
Climate Change AI (CCAI) empowers a global community of innovators, practitioners, and decision-makers to accelerate responsible climate action through the use of AI, by addressing critical gaps in expertise, education, coordination, and research-to-deployment infrastructure. Since 2019, CCAI has inspired, informed, and connected thousands of stakeholders through networking and knowledge-sharing events, summer schools and other educational programs, international policy reports, and multi-million dollar global grants programs. See the CCAI website for further details.

Application

To apply, please send the following to apply@climatechange.ai:

1. Your current CV or resume.
2. Links to relevant code (e.g. open-source GitHub repositories) illustrating backend and database management experience. Optional: links to websites illustrating frontend development.
3. Cover letter discussing why you are interested in this position and providing examples of relevant past experiences.

References may be requested at a later stage of the process.