Software Engineer – Data Engineering and Machine Learning

Rhizome is seeking a Software Engineer who can scale our Data Engineering capacity and contribute to Machine Learning development at the enterprise scale. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in data processing pipelines, DAGs, ETLs, feature extraction, and statistical analytics using Python and AWS cloud.  The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in working with GIS data, relational databases, CSVs, and Excel at the enterprise scale. Successful candidates will also have practical experience building large scale ETL pipelines on AWS or GCP for data engineering, feature extraction, statistical analysis, and correlations.

Rhizome is at the forefront of developing decision intelligence technology at the intersection of climate science and infrastructure systems. Our team pursues this endeavor with the wisdom and steadiness of industry veterans, and the curiosity, grit, and energy of startup and technology enthusiasts.

Our climate resilience SaaS platform helps utilities, governments, and industries plan for greater resilience to climate change and extreme weather by applying AI to a vast amount of information that characterizes infrastructure assets and their vulnerability to extreme weather. Focused on the $500B resilience investment gap in the grid today, our mandate is simple: Help electric utilities proactively adapt to climate change by integrating cutting-edge climate-asset intelligence into their existing planning workflows. As the world experiences record-breaking climate-related impacts, especially related to grid failures, our platform identifies future extreme weather vulnerabilities on utility assets at high resolutions and empowers planners to optimize investment deployments that keep society safe during natural hazard events.

• Design, construct, and maintain data pipelines to combine large volumes of geospatial, climate + weather, and electric utility datasets.
• Work with a cross-functional team to deliver data in support of analytic and ML pipelines.
• Develop deep familiarity with electric utility datasets and take ownership of integration of new datasets into our existing environments.
• Contribute to ML model development in the context of understanding future extreme weather impacts on the power grid.
• Optimize storage and ETL pipelines.
• Develop versioned, scalable, repeatable and reliable pipelines for utility data that is in GIS and Tabular format to Delta Lake format.
• Scale & Automate data pipelines for statistical analysis for internal and external use-cases.
• Standardize and scale multi-tenant data storage.
• Exceptional ability to diagnose data issues and discrepancies.
• Ability to modularize different stages of data ingestion and verification.
• Ability to write algorithms for data sanity checks and classification of different data elements.
• Ability to develop heuristics and suggestions for missing data items.
• Ability to validate and test pipelines and write functional test to validate the pipelines.

• Exceptional Python programming skills.
• Exceptional programming skills with NumPy, SciPy, Xarrays.
• Exceptional programming skills with frameworks like Dagster or Airflow or Prefect.
• Exceptional programming skills with Databricks or Apache Spark or Amazon EMR or Cloudera.
• Deep expertise in storage optimization and partitioning on RDS, Postgres, PostGIS, Delta Lake.
• Hands on with GIS dataset and QGIS or ESRI.
• Hands of Experience with multi-dimensional Climate or Weather data.
• Familiarity or hands on experience with Secure Cloud Development.

We’ll pay extra close attention if you have:

• Exposure or experience with electric utility tech stacks (AMS, OMS, GIS, etc.).
• Exposure to applied ML and Data Engineering in the context of electric utilities.

At Rhizome, we lead with compassion and empathy, aiming to understand before we help. Our thesis as technologists is that, in order to fulfill our mission to protect society from the impacts of climate change through intentional, intelligent infrastructure planning, we need to embark on a journey of respectfully listening, learning, and then problem-solving. This sentiment is represented through our core values: 

Empathy: Understanding and relating to problems, customers, and each other, with humility.

Creativity: Exploring with curiosity and building with intention.

Aspiration: Striving for societal impact, personal fulfillment, and simply doing good work.

Tenacity: Pushing past barriers and the status quo with a sense of optimism and determination.

Service Excellence: Delivering high-quality outcomes for our customers, colleagues, and communities.

Rhizome offers salaries and an excellent package of benefits and stock options. Compensation is based on a variety of factors including experience, role, and location. 

Salary Range: $130,000 - $170,000

Benefits: Unlimited time off, stock options, excellent health, dental, and vision, and 401k.