What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Software Engineer position at Overstory?
The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time—but it’s also the greatest opportunity for innovation, and a challenge we’re proud to take on. At Overstory, we’re harnessing cutting-edge technology to enable a resilient electrical grid that keeps communities thriving as our world changes.
The grid is the backbone of life as we know it. It powers hospitals, keeps food fresh, and ensures communities stay connected. But extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and growing wildfire risks are putting this critical system under pressure. All of this combined makes the electric utility industry the greatest opportunity for tackling climate change.
One of the leading causes of catastrophic wildfires and power outages? Trees and brush coming into contact with power lines.
That’s where we help. At Overstory, we use AI and advanced satellite imagery to pinpoint and prioritize vegetation risks before they materialize. By giving utilities critical analysis on those risks, we’re helping prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate the transition to a safer, more resilient grid.
Our team spans the Americas and Europe, and we work with utility partners across the Americas and beyond. We’re outdoor enthusiasts, musicians, artists, athletes, parents, and adventurers—15 nationalities strong and growing. What unites us is a passion for solving complex problems, a commitment to climate action, and the belief that technology should be a force for good.
Join us to help us build a more resilient world together.
Your responsibilities
As a Staff Engineer, you will work within the Vegetation Management Experience team to evolve a suite of web tools that enable utility companies to more effectively manage risks associated with climate change, wildfires and storms.
We Are Seeking Improvement In The Following Areas
This role will start off being primarily team scoped solving critical scaling challenges. There is scope to expand remit as we grow.
Technical Skills
What you will do
Nice-to-haves
What You Get
We are a group of 100 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Canada. We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.
Diversity & Inclusion
We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.
We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the nine people on our leadership team are female, 46% of the overall team are female and 20% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks fifteen languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Estonian, Danish and Korean.
Our values
Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.
We act with urgency.
Our curiosity fuels our growth.
We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.
We’re rooted in diversity.
Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.
We Care For Each Other.
We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.
Trust is fundamental.
We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.
_________________________________
Use of AI in Our Hiring Process
We sometimes use AI tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as helping us manage applications more efficiently or ensuring job descriptions are clear and inclusive. But don’t worry, all hiring decisions are always made by people, not machines. Any data processed by AI is handled securely in line with GDPR and our Privacy Notice.
The grid is the backbone of life as we know it. It powers hospitals, keeps food fresh, and ensures communities stay connected. But extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and growing wildfire risks are putting this critical system under pressure. All of this combined makes the electric utility industry the greatest opportunity for tackling climate change.
One of the leading causes of catastrophic wildfires and power outages? Trees and brush coming into contact with power lines.
That’s where we help. At Overstory, we use AI and advanced satellite imagery to pinpoint and prioritize vegetation risks before they materialize. By giving utilities critical analysis on those risks, we’re helping prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate the transition to a safer, more resilient grid.
Our team spans the Americas and Europe, and we work with utility partners across the Americas and beyond. We’re outdoor enthusiasts, musicians, artists, athletes, parents, and adventurers—15 nationalities strong and growing. What unites us is a passion for solving complex problems, a commitment to climate action, and the belief that technology should be a force for good.
Join us to help us build a more resilient world together.
Your responsibilities
As a Staff Engineer, you will work within the Vegetation Management Experience team to evolve a suite of web tools that enable utility companies to more effectively manage risks associated with climate change, wildfires and storms.
We Are Seeking Improvement In The Following Areas
- Performance & Scalability: ensure that our product can handle 3x YoY growth
- Accelerate time to value of new product capabilities
- Reduce the amount of manual work required to ingest vegetation analysis into our customer facing tools
This role will start off being primarily team scoped solving critical scaling challenges. There is scope to expand remit as we grow.
Technical Skills
What you will do
- Broad and deep understanding of system design with an ability to select the correct paradigm/technology given the situation and constraints.
- Develops a deep understanding of our business domains and how technology can be applied to drive business impact.
- Innovates and introduces new technologies or methodologies.
- Resolves complex technical challenges with innovative solutions.
- Leads cross-team initiatives or leads on architectural system design at team level
- Drives pragmatic technology choices/decisions making sensible trade offs in order to balance current and future business needs.
- Defines coding standards and engineering best practices.
- Evaluates and recommends new tools and technologies.
- Hands-on contribution
- Mentors and coaches engineers.
- Influences technical decisions at the organizational level.
- Collaborates with product managers and CTO to inform how technology can influence or enable the product strategy.
- Experience of working in a high growth scaleup environment
- Product minded and able to demonstrate significant impact you have had on a business through the application of technology
- Proven experience of full stack development across the following (or similar) technologies: React/Typescript, Python/fastAPI, Postgres DB, Data pipelines)
- Comfortable working in a build it, run it environment (GCP, cloud run, grafana, k8s) - or similar.
- Ability to design and implement scalable and resilient systems.
- Strong leadership skills with the ability to mentor and coach engineers at all levels.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
- Passion for learning and staying updated with evolving technologies and industry trends.
- You are based in GMT/ CET time zone. Open to US ET for those that are able to have significant overlap with GMT/ CET working hours.
Nice-to-haves
- You can demonstrate experience scaling large distributed architectures.
- You have experience in working in a remote-first environment.
- You have worked with satellite data and/or imagery.
What You Get
- To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis.
- Flexible working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our work days around our lives, not the other way around.
- Other benefits like a remote working budget, an educational budget and time to develop new skills.
- To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance and respect.
- Equity and a competitive salary.
We are a group of 100 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Canada. We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.
Diversity & Inclusion
We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.
We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the nine people on our leadership team are female, 46% of the overall team are female and 20% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks fifteen languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Estonian, Danish and Korean.
Our values
Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.
We act with urgency.
Our curiosity fuels our growth.
We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.
We’re rooted in diversity.
Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.
We Care For Each Other.
We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.
Trust is fundamental.
We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.
_________________________________
Use of AI in Our Hiring Process
We sometimes use AI tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as helping us manage applications more efficiently or ensuring job descriptions are clear and inclusive. But don’t worry, all hiring decisions are always made by people, not machines. Any data processed by AI is handled securely in line with GDPR and our Privacy Notice.