Staff Data Engineer

Overstory; Netherlands; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Flexible, autonomous and collaborative

Home office stipend

Education budgets

Mission-driven work

Job summary

Overstory is seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead the design and scaling of the data platform supporting AI-powered vegetation analysis. You will own the architecture, shape pipeline patterns, and drive durable data quality and observability across production systems.

You will mentor engineers, define service boundaries, and push forward a service-oriented architecture for scalable, auditable results. This is a remote-first role with a globally distributed team.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building production-grade data pipelines and systems.
• Deep expertise in distributed data architectures and scalable platforms.
• Hands-on Dagster expertise; production-grade orchestration in real pipelines.
• Strong Python skills and familiarity with Google Cloud services.
• Experience with idempotent pipelines, backfills, and partitioning.
• Proven ability to design service-oriented architectures and data contracts.
• Experience mentoring engineers and shaping data-platform standards.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the data platform to scale with geospatial & temporal data.
• Lead production data pipelines from ingestion to delivery.
• Define service boundaries, data contracts, and failure modes.
• Drive a service-oriented architecture and modular, deployable components.
• Build event-driven workflows with robust messaging patterns.
• Establish observability, testing, and data quality frameworks.
• Mentor engineers and set data-system development standards.

Skills

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

Dagster

Python

Google Cloud

Pub/Sub

Event-driven

Observability

Mentoring

Remote collaboration

Tools

Dagster

Airflow

Prefect

Google Cloud

BigQuery

Pub/Sub

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 it’s 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

Note: We believe that all people are capable of great things. We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the requirements that are listed within this job description.

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