Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Center for Geospatial Solutions is hiring a Backend Software Engineer I/II to build and maintain backend infrastructure for Internet of Water data systems. The role develops software, data pipelines, and CI/CD services, while collaborating with domain experts and supporting reliable, high-quality water data management.
Responsibilities
- Develop and modify internal and external-facing software as part of engineering teams that may include internal team staff and external collaborators and/or contractors
- Focus on developing backend software components and services that interact with upstream and downstream components (including front-end user interfaces and back-end data management and transformation processes and APIs)
- Develop reusable tools, libraries, and frameworks for data integration, analysis, and visualization that can be applied across multiple projects and initiatives
- Produce high-quality code and software for data management, publication, aggregation, and visualization with appropriate documentation
- Ensure reproducibility, accessibility, and sustainability of Center-developed software and data systems
- Participate in all aspects of the application development life cycle, including specifications, prototypes, development, quality assurance, deployment, and operations and maintenance
- Design, develop, and maintain efficient data pipelines that extract data from various data sources, transform it into a unified data model, and push it to a destination data store through strong collaboration with water, land, and housing domain experts to understand data sources and requirements
- Develop end-to-end systems for data harmonization, geocoding, and integration of large, heterogeneous datasets from diverse sources
- Implement data validation and cleansing processes to ensure high data quality and integrity
- Identify and integrate new technologies and tools to improve data processing and storage
- Work closely with water domain experts to translate domain-specific needs into technical requirements
- Create and maintain documentation for data pipelines, including data models, ETL processes, and data flow diagrams
- Assume principal responsibility for CI/CD of web services as well as software and data releases
- Support research, development, and operations by troubleshooting and resolving issues that arise
- Take technical responsibility for systems and be on the lookout for opportunities for new systems, improvement of existing systems, and work with the team to keep systems scaling and performing optimally
- Participate in team code reviews, present your work for feedback, and provide constructive feedback to others
- Clearly communicate technical capabilities, limitations, issues, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences, including stakeholders, partners, and domain experts
- Work collegially and successfully in interdisciplinary teams with colleagues from various topical backgrounds and different skill levels and communication levels
- Contribute to grant proposals, technical documentation, and reports that support CGS and Internet of Water initiatives
- Participate in training, workshops, and outreach activities to promote best practices in water data management and geospatial solutions
Skills
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field or equivalent practical experience
- 2-4 years of API development and documentation experience, including complying with OpenAPI 3.0 or other standards-based APIs
- Experience building data pipelines for large, heterogeneous datasets from diverse sources
- Fluency in Python
- Proficiency in relational databases and SQL
- Experience with designing, developing, deploying and monitoring data systems (such as PostgreSQL, DuckDB, Snowflake, Apache Spark)
- Proficiency with Docker
- Experience contributing to open-source projects and using open standards
- Demonstrated application of reproducible software development practices including testing, documentation, and version control
- Experience with git or other source code control systems
- U.S. Citizen, or legally authorized to work in the United States with no need for future sponsorship
- Collegial and able to work successfully in interdisciplinary teams with colleagues from various topical backgrounds and different skill levels and communication levels
- Exceptional critical thinking skills with the ability to deconstruct complex problems, prioritize issues, and implement sensible solutions
- Strong ability to communicate technical and computational concepts clearly to non-technical audiences, including domain experts, stakeholders, and partners
- Self-motivated and goal-oriented with the ability to take an innovative, strategic, and analytical approach to research and collaboration
- Desire to learn new skills and solve problems
- Willingness and ability to learn new frameworks, data structures, and infrastructure
- Understanding of large, high performance, highly scalable, highly resilient server-based architectures including replication/failover, distributed architectures, caches, auto scaling, sharding, rate limiting, and security
- Familiarity with geospatial data structures and infrastructure, with emphasis on vector data (e.g., GeoPandas, GDAL, PostGIS, GeoJSON, Geoparquet)
- Raster data management experience
- Familiarity with environmental, social, administrative data
- Familiarity with RDF, knowledge graphs, and JSON-LD
- Familiarity with ETL orchestration tools and frameworks (e.g. Airflow, Airbyte, Dagster)
- Experience with CI/CD tools and methods
- Experience with public cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and DigitalOcean, including networking and serverless infrastructure
- Familiarity with the ActivityPub protocol
- Familiarity with JavaScript and at least one web framework such as Rails, Django, Vue, React
- Familiarity with geospatial front-end frameworks (e.g. leaflet, openlayers)
- Experience with data visualization and dashboard frameworks (e.g., D3.js, Plotly, Dash, Observable)
Benefits
- 3x employer contribution towards retirement matching your employee contribution up to 15%
- Health insurance; the Institute pays 95% of medical plan premiums
- Dental insurance, with no dental plan premiums
- Vision insurance
- Health reimbursement account
- Short-term disability coverage
- Long term disability coverage
- Paid parental leave
- Voluntary insurances such as accident insurance
- Health care flexible spending
- Dependent care flexible spending
- Paid time off for holidays, vacation, personal, sick, bereavement, and jury duty
- Office closure between December 24 – Jan 1 each calendar year
- Flexible schedule and option for a compressed 4 day workweek
- Tuition and staff development reimbursement
- Pet insurance
- Employee Assistance Program
- Fully remote work
Company Overview