About Us
We are a fast-growing, Series A NatureTech company (backed by leading investors AzureX Space Ventures, Equinor Ventures, and Intercontinental Exchange) on a mission to enable zero deforestation and degradation and support mass forest restoration by producing the highest-quality nature mapping data and insights products.
Data is at the heart of Space Intelligence. We process large volumes of satellite data and analyse it within a machine learning framework to produce valuable nature mapping products for our clients.
Our products are trusted by the developers and investors in nature-based solutions, including Apple, Climate Asset Management, Everland, and WCS. They are also used to support the validation of compliance with the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) through our partnership with ICE’s Commodity Traceability Service (COT).
We are a group of passionate, dedicated individuals with deep technical and scientific knowledge necessary for producing reliable, high-quality data and insights. We have a strong understanding of our customers’ needs and develop long-term relationships that add value.
We are a values-driven organisation, embodying these principles in our daily work: we are Science-driven, with a Commitment to Quality, always Acting with Integrity. We have a focus on Innovation to create better products for our clients and an overall commitment to Equality. We are striving to create a commercial culture that is meritocratic and outcome-oriented.
Role Overview
We are growing our Data engineering team, to support the creation of continental scale maps of the world’s forests. You’ll be building high scale data pipelines and data infrastructure and platforms, working with large compute clusters (thousands of cores) and up to PB scale datasets.
You’ll partner closely with our Science and Research teams, helping create new data products, and optimise the creation of existing ones.
We are still a young, startup culture company, so you’ll relish Agility, fast decision making, and significant autonomy to “Do The Right Thing” and optimise our software and process.
As a senior Engineer, you’ll be comfortable leading on design, coding and operational tasks, and you’ll invest significant time in mentoring and training more junior scientists and engineers in engineering skills.
Our Engineers operate their own platforms in production, in a DevOps like model, and we welcome applicants with either a Data Engineering, or DevOps / DataOps focus.
Finally, we are a science lead company. While you may not have a science background, you’ll enjoy working in a science lead environment, and learning about the science that lays behind our code.
Key Responsibilities
Your main responsibility is to develop, enhance and operate high quality data pipelines and platforms.
- Be a technical leader in the team, mentoring and training other team members, and stepping up to lead projects or delivery as needed.
- Deliver high quality, low defect, maintainable (well structured for extension, well designed, documented & tested) code and systems, working closely as part of the team.
- Review other engineers’ code, with a focus on their development – using the opportunity to mentor and train them.
- Debug and fix issues . – including providing UK business hours support.
- Work closely with our users – our world class science team.
There are opportunities for additional responsibilities within this position such as Scrum roles (product owner or scrum master).
Key Skills and experience
The ideal candidate will have extensive experience of software engineering (typically 5+ years), including design, implementation, testing (including automated) and problem diagnosis. A technical degree or equivalent experience – Software Engineering/CS/ML degree is a bonus but not required. Significant experience in Data or ML engineering is essential. You’ll have passion for putting the user first and a strong focus on quality. You will have taken ownership of the development of significant software products or components in a multi-person team.
Desirable:
- ML (both classical, and NN based approaches – e.g. SkiKit-Learn, TensorFlow/PyTorch etc)
- Geospatial data processing,
- Experience of DevOps, or an interest in Infrastructure.
The role will report to our Head of Engineering or AI R&D Lead.
Our tech stack is as follows – knowledge of these is a bonus but not required – we are far more interested in potential, than exact day 1 knowledge. We are looking for dynamic engineers, with a solid grounding, but also keen to learn new things fast:
- Azure – we use containers, serverless, kubernetes clusters etc. as appropriate
- Terraform
- Python
- xArray and Dask for Data and ML specific tasks
- GitHub
- Agile development processes (Scrum based)
Salary
Starting salary range £50,000 – £70,000. Placing dependent on experience. Pro rata for part-time.
Working for Space Intelligence
At Space Intelligence, we offer a competitive salary and benefits – 33 holiday days per year, an extra day off for your birthday, a good pension plan with 5% employer contribution and salary sacrifice option for tax efficiency, an Employee Savings on Purchases Platform and an Employee Assistance Programme, as well as other benefits. We have a friendly, fun and supportive workplace, and we strongly value work-life balance. We are emphatically not a company with a long-hours culture, we are family-friendly and support flexible working and part-time, where possible. We also schedule a range of events including lunches, escape rooms, pub trips, crazy golf, bowling and much more. In addition, we do company and team away days.
We are, proudly, a diverse, multicultural team and our employees come from 11 different countries.
Where will I work?
We are looking for a candidate who will be based in our office on George Street, Edinburgh. Most of our team are in the office most days, and we feel you will learn fastest if you are in the office most days too. However, we support hybrid working and would be happy for you to work 1-2 days a week from home.
Please note, that if you don’t currently have the right to work in the UK, we do not sponsor visas so please check out the UK Government website for further information about visas before applying.
Closing date: This is an open role so we have not set a date to apply by. If interested, we’d love to see your CV as soon as possible.