Staff Data Engineer

Overstory; France; Remote; EUR 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home office stipend

Flexible working environment

Education budgets

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Overstory is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead the design and scaling of a data platform powering AI-driven vegetation analysis. You will own architecture, mentor engineers, and set standards for pipelines, data quality, and observability across a globally distributed team.

You'll partner with data, ML, and product engineers to balance pragmatic delivery with durability, tracing, and scalable data contracts, shaping the next generation of our data infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 10+ years designing and building production-grade data pipelines.
• Deep hands-on Dagster experience in production environments.
• Strong Python and Google Cloud skills.
• Experience with Pub/Sub and event-driven patterns.
• Experience designing service-oriented architectures and data contracts.
• Mentor engineers and lead architectural discussions.
• Experience in remote-first, globally distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the orchestration layer for scalable pipelines.
• Design production data pipelines for geospatial and temporal data.
• Lead system design across the data platform and define boundaries and contracts.
• Drive service-oriented architecture and decouple components for independent deployment.
• Build event-driven workflows with durable messaging patterns.
• Establish observability, testing, and data quality frameworks.

Skills

Dagster

Python

Google Cloud

Pub/Sub

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

Service-oriented architecture

Data quality

Observability

Mentoring

Tools

Dagster

BigQuery

Airflow

Job description

Role & Team

As a Staff Data Engineer at Overstory, you will lead the design and scaling of the data platform that enables Overstory's AI-powered vegetation analysis. Our analysis depends on moving enormous volumes of satellite imagery, model inferences, and utility network data through orchestrated pipelines reliably, repeatably, and on time to support customer decision-making. You'll own the architecture of that platform and set the direction for how it evolves.

You'll work closely with data, ML, and product engineers, as well as product teams, to make sure the data flowing into our models and out to our customers balances pragmatic delivery with durability, traceability, and scalability. As a senior technical leader, you'll mentor other engineers, drive architectural decisions, and set standards for pipeline design, service boundaries, and data quality across Overstory.

Time zone requirement: Europe (GMT/WET, CET, EET) and Eastern North America (NST, AST, EST).

What You'll Do

• Architect and evolve our orchestration layer — asset graphs, quality checks, partitioning strategies, and the patterns that keep it scaling reliably.
• Design and maintain production data pipelines for large-scale geospatial and temporal data, from ingestion through transformation to delivery.
• Lead system design work across the data platform, including service boundaries, data contracts, and designing around the failure modes that come with each.
• Drive the shift toward a service-oriented architecture, decoupling tightly bound components into services that teams can own and deploy independently.
• Build event-driven workflows, replacing brittle coupling and manual coordination with durable messaging patterns.
• Establish observability, testing, and data quality frameworks so problems surface before customers see them, allowing any result to be traced back and explained.
• Mentor engineers and define the standards for how we build, test, and operate data systems.

Skills & Experience

• Experience thriving at the intersection of data engineering, distributed systems, and large-scale scientific data; deeply motivated by the opportunity to reduce wildfire risk and improve grid resilience through better data patterns and infrastructure
• 10+ years of experience designing and building production-grade data pipelines and systems
• Deep hands-on experience with Dagster — asset-based orchestration, partitions, sensors, and the operational side of running it in production (comparable experience with Airflow, Prefect, or similar is a reasonable substitute if you're ready to go deep on Dagster)
• Proven track record building and operating data pipelines at scale, with a real feel for idempotency, backfills, and partitioning
• Experience in preparing systems to handle periods of high demand with a focus on testability and scalability best practices
• Strong system design skills — you can reason about boundaries, contracts, coupling, and failure modes, and explain the tradeoffs to people who'll use and build on them
• Practical experience designing service-oriented architecture, including versioning and keeping things operational through migrations
• Strong Python skills and experience with Google Cloud
• Experience with Pub/Sub and event-driven patterns
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate across engineering, ML, and product
• Comfortable leading architectural discussions and mentoring other engineers
• Experience in remote-first and globally distributed team

Nice To Have

• Comfort working with geospatial data and the ways that its stored
• Experience building data pipelines that power ML training and inference
• Experience with analytics engineering tooling and warehouse modeling in BigQuery
• Infrastructure-as-code experience and comfort owning your systems in production
• Background in remote sensing, forestry, or the utility sector

What We Offer

• Competitive, location-specific compensation and benefits
• Flexible, autonomous and collaborative working environment rooted in trust - we build our work days around our lives, not the other way around
• Home office stipend, coworking and ongoing education budgets
• A company culture that genuinely embodies each of our core values
• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth's natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis