Climate change is one of the most important issues of our time. Community Energy Labs is working to meet that challenge by helping to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings with our innovative, machine learning-powered SaaS platform. 

We’re looking for a Lead Backend Engineer with experience building resilient event-driven microservices, and a deep hands-on devops skillset, to help us architect, scale, and operate our platform. 

In this role, you’ll be the first full-time engineer on our team and will partner  with our Head of Engineering to design and implement solutions to our most important technical challenges as we move from successful prototype into production. This role will be rigorous and require a wide-ranging skill set (but we hope fun and rewarding) and our interview process reflects that. 

WHAT WE DO 

Community Energy Labs enables buildings to use energy when clean sources of power are available and to use less energy overall by making smart decisions about when and how energy is used.  We primarily work with communities and schools, whose buildings make up nearly 30% of the commercial floor space in the US! 

Community Energy Labs, its employees, and its customers are driven to be a part of the solution to saving our planet. Our software combines cutting edge control algorithms, machine learning, and traditional control techniques to lower cost and manage energy.  We combine that with an intuitive user interface that doesn’t require a PhD in mechanical engineering to make saving money and the planet easy for everyone - even cash-strapped schools with overworked building operators.

CEL's core AI-powered clean building control platform concept was a regional winner of  CleanTech Open's 2020 international accelerator, an overall winner in the  2020 Madrona Venture  Labs Go Vertical challenge, a three time SBIR winner with the Department of Energy, USDA, and NSF. CEL is a community member in Elemental Excelerator, Google for Startups and other prestigious accelerators. Follow CEL on LinkedIn. 

 

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS & RESPONSIBILITIES

// BACKEND SOFTWARE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

• Partner with the Head of Engineering to understand stakeholder needs and create architectural designs and technical specifications

• Implement efficient, resilient, scalable microservices, libraries, and data pipeline components
• Write automated tests and perform ad-hoc testing on systems as needed

 

// INFRASTRUCTURE AND DEVOPS

• Collaborate on defining our devops best practices and researching cloud infrastructure tools and solutions
• Implement configuration management and observability systems and dashboards
• Participate in the devops lifecycle to support our production systems including on-call rotation

 

//  COLLABORATION, MENTORSHIP, & COMMUNICATION 

• Mentor more junior team members, providing encouragement, constructive feedback, and support their growth and development
• Create and maintain technical documentation to facilitate knowledge sharing with the team

• Review and provide feedback on code changes from other team members to ensure code quality and maintain best practices 

• Participate in weekly, per-sprint, and quarterly planning and agile rituals to prioritize work and coordination with team members

• Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, curiosity, and accountability

 

QUALIFICATIONS 

// EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

• 5+ years of backend software development experience, preferably in the context of a microservice-oriented SaaS platform
• 3+ years of hands-on devops experience, owning mission-critical production systems in an AWS or GCP environment
• 3+ years of experience with event-driven or streaming service architectures

 

//  NECESSARY SKILLS/ABILITIES

• Expert-level proficiency with Python and common libraries (SQLAlchemy, Alembic, FastAPI)
• Strong proficiency with Docker
• Strong proficiency with networking tools and concepts like VPC
• Strong proficiency with SQL and relational databases
• Proficiency with AWS or GCP container runtime environments (ECS, EKS, etc)
• Strong English-language written and verbal communication skills
• Experience working with observability tools like Grafana/Prometheus, New Relic, Data Dog, etc.
• Ability to balance scope, time, and quality needs associated with product development
• Desire to learn new skills 
• Strong critical thinking abilities

 

//  NICE TO HAVE, BUT NOT REQUIRED

• Experience with API design
• Experience with BACnet or other building control technologies
• Experience with IoT platforms
• Experience with building machine learning pipelines and runtime infrastructure
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform
• Experience implementing frontend systems in React or similar technologies
• Experience working in a startup environment
• A great sense of humor

 

ROLE BASICS  

// EXPECTED HOURS OF WORK AND TRAVEL

• This is a fully remote role with some travel responsibilities (for partner and customer prospect visits, conferences, occasional company get-togethers, etc.)

• This position is a full-time position that may occasionally require extra hours and weekend work that is not compensated as overtime

• CEL is a small team where versatility is essential.  We embrace a wide range of responsibilities and functions.

 

//  SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES 

• This position initially has no supervisory responsibilities. As an integral part of CEL's product team, you'll operate with a high degree of autonomy while actively collaborating with the product team (our CEO), Head of Engineering, Data Science and some non technical team member for  direction, support and mentorship.

 

//  SALARY

• The annual salary for this position is expected to be $120k - 160k  per year for an FTE or 40 hours per week work schedule. 

 

//  PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS 

• Some travel may be required for conferences or support with customers 
• No heavy lifting is expected 

 

//  ATTRIBUTES 

// Ideal CEL community members demonstrate

–  Curiosity

–  Adaptability

–  Trustworthiness

–  A pragmatic approach to effort vs. value

–  Willingness to communicate & teach

–  Willingness to listen & learn

YES, THAT MEANS YOU!  

//  We’ve read the research and we know that certain underrepresented groups in tech might read  our post and think “Oh, gee, well I only have nine out of ten qualifications.”  If our mission and this job speak to you and you have the interest and ability to work smart, learn, and grow with us then we want you to apply for this job! 

Community Energy Labs is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law.