Data Engineer

Data Engineer

Full time, London or UK-based.

 

About us:

BeZero Carbon is a global ratings agency for the Voluntary Carbon Market. Our ratings allow all market participants to price and manage risk. BeZero’s ratings and research tools support buyers, intermediaries, investors, and carbon project developers.

 

Founded in April 2020, our 120-strong team combines climatic and earth sciences, sell-side financial research, earth observation, machine learning, data and technology, engineering, and public policy expertise. We work from five continents.

 

www.bezerocarbon.com

 

Background on the role:

BeZero is seeking a mid-level data engineer to join our data engineering team. The team is responsible for building and deploying data and machine learning products for our client-facing platform and internal teams. The team sits at the heart of the business, working across our ratings, product, and technology teams.

 

As a data team, we have a bias towards shipping products, staying close to our internal and external customers, end-to-end ownership of our infrastructure and deployments. This is a team that follows software engineering best practices closely. Our data stack includes the following technologies:

 

• AWS serves as our cloud infrastructure provider.

• Snowflake acts as our central data warehouse for tabular data. AWS S3 is used for any of our raster data, and we use PostGIS for querying geospatial vector data.

• We use dbt for building SQL-style data models and Python jobs for non-SQL data transformations.

• Prefect as our workflow orchestration manager, and our jobs are executed on AWS ECS.

• AWS Sagemaker acts as a platform for data science and research teams to develop models.

• Metabase serves as a dashboarding solution for end-users.

• GitHub Actions is our chosen CI / CD tool.

 

In this role, you will contribute to the development of data products and algorithms that directly impact how our ratings team analyzes carbon offset projects. You will work with various types of data, including:

 

• Processing large volumes of geospatial raster and vector data to create data products that quantify factors like fire risk, drought risk, deforestation rates, carbon stocks, and other metrics relevant to carbon offset projects.
• Utilizing natural language processing techniques to extract data points from carbon offset project documents, which are essential inputs for our ratings process.
• Working with structured data on carbon offset projects and accreditation bodies, providing insights for our research on carbon market and policy trends.

 

Although we work across all these different areas, this role will have a strong emphasis on working with geospatial raster and vector data. While previous experience in this domain is a strong bonus, it is not a must-have for us, and we are able to train you in the geospatial data domain.

 

We are a remote-friendly company; however, for this position, we will only consider applications from candidates based in the UK. If you are located in or near London, you are welcome to work from our London office.

Responsibilities:

 

You will be an individual contributor in our geospatial data team, focused on developing and maintaining and maintaining geospatial data products to be deployed on our carbon markets platform or used internally by our ratings team.

 

You will build automated data pipelines to collect and manipulate large geospatial data sets, including optical satellite imagery, SAR and LiDAR data, climate data, and others.

 

You will work with our internal research and ratings teams to integrate the outputs of (analytical) data pipelines into BeZero’s business processes.

 

You’ll be our ideal candidate if:

 

You care deeply about the climate and carbon markets and are excited by solutions for decarbonising our economy.

 

You are a highly collaborative individual who wants to solve problems that drive business value.

 

You have at least 2 years of experience building ELT pipelines in production for data engineering or machine learning use cases, using Python and SQL.

 

You have hands-on experience with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Prefect, Dagster, Airflow, Luigi), containerization, a cloud platform (we use AWS but any cloud platform will do) and the Python scientific computing stack (NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, pandas, etc).

 

You can write clean, maintainable, scalable, and robust code in Python and SQL, and familiar with collaborative coding best practices (e.g., for Python PEP8 code style, unit testing, continuous integration tools such as flake8, black, isort, etc).

 

You are well-versed in code version control and have experience working in team setups on production code repositories.

 

Bonus points (but we’d still like to hear from you if you don’t have experience in any of these)

 

You have experience dealing with a variety of geospatial data formats (e.g., netCDF, (cloud-optimised) geotiff, geoJSONs, zarr) and geospatial SQL and Python packages (e.g., PostGIS, xarray, rasterio, shapely, gdal).

 

You have experience in deploying cloud resources using tools such as AWS Cloud Formation, Terraform, etc.

 

You have experience in productionising and analysing specific satellite imagery data types like SAR, LiDAR, or RADAR or another remote sensing domain.

 

Research has shown that women are less likely than men to apply for a role if they don’t have experience in 100% of the requirements outlined in a job description. Please know that even if you don’t have experience in all the areas above but think you could do a great job and are excited about shaping company culture, finding great people, and building great teams, we’d love to hear from you!

 

What we’ll offer:

• Competitive salary and opportunity for equity in a rapidly growing VC-backed start-up through share options

• Ability to learn and develop alongside a range of sector specialists from the scientific, economic and business community

• Opportunity to work in a cross-cutting role, interacting with lots of different parts of the business

• Growth opportunities that come from working at a fast-paced VC-backed technology business

• Opportunity to work remote or in our East London office space (Hoxton) with flexibility to work from home + some flexibility over working location during the summer

• Regular social events

• 25 days leave (with additional time off between Christmas and New Year, and for your birthday)

• Private medical insurance, dental, critical illness cover, income protection, life assurance, medical cash plan, cycle to work scheme, and a health and wellness cash allowance

 

Our interview process:

• Initial screening interview with recruiter (15 mins)
• Introduction call with Chief Data Strategist (30 mins)
• 2x Technical interview with members from the data engineering & science team (60-90 mins)
• Reference checks + offer

 

We value diversity at BeZero Carbon. We need a team that brings different perspectives and backgrounds together to build the tools needed to make the voluntary carbon market transparent. We’re therefore committed to not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, veteran status, age, or disability.