Hiring: Lead Data Platform Engineer

Conservation Metrics is hiring a
Lead Data Platform Engineer

REMOTE (Preference for candidates located in California, Virginia, Nevada, or Minnesota. We are willing to explore setting up employment in a new US state for an exceptional candidate.)

About Conservation Metrics

Conservation Metrics, Inc. (CMI) is a mission-driven social enterprise dedicated to providing technology-driven monitoring services that improve outcomes in the environmental and social justice spheres. We help partners ranging from non-profits to local governments and Indigenous community organizations across the globe design ecological or biocultural studies, incorporate remote sensing and field surveying tools, report on real-world outcomes, and iterate on methods to achieve their conservation and stewardship goals.

We are looking for a Lead Data Platform Engineer who thrives in a role of supporting grassroots community efforts with a purpose at a mission-oriented company. Your expertise and commitment will make a meaningful impact in our world.

About the Guardian Connector project

https://guardianconnector.net/

Indigenous Peoples around the world are working to protect and govern their territories under increasing pressure from extractive industries, illegal activity, and climate change. Conservation Metrics, in partnership with Indigenous organizations and allied institutions such as Nia Tero, Awana Digital, and Imazon, supports this work through our Indigenous Guardianship Program, which centers on the Guardian Connector platform.

Guardian Connector is an interoperable, open-source data platform designed to support territorial monitoring and Indigenous data sovereignty. It combines remote sensing products (maps, alerts, and change detection), mobile data collection tools, secure data warehousing, LLM-assisted analysis tools, and governed data access to allow communities to explore, analyze, and summarize their information.

The platform is designed to place governance and community control at the center of the data lifecycle. Indigenous partners determine how their data is structured, accessed, shared, and interpreted, while the technology adapts to local cultural, linguistic, and political contexts. Our goal is to move away from extractive monitoring projects and toward a durable data platform that enables Indigenous communities to define the metrics used to represent their territories and well-being.

We are seeking a Lead Data Platform Engineer

As Lead Data Platform Engineer you will own the architecture and data infrastructure behind the Guardian Connector platform. You will work with engineering and partner-facing teams to build systems that support Indigenous data sovereignty, secure collaboration, and long-term stewardship of community data.

This is a Lead role. We are looking for someone who can sit with hard architectural trade-offs, work through them with the team and our partners, and commit. The realities of building software in this domain require choosing the best path forward despite the trade-offs rather than holding out for a perfect option that doesn’t exist. Our team is strong on rigor, exploration, and care; we want a Lead who complements that with the discipline to close decisions, ship, and work with our Partner Support team so they can enable others to use the software.

You will also be a hands-on engineer. We expect Leads at CMI to write production code, review others’ work, and stay close enough to the system to have grounded opinions about it.

What we’re looking for:

  • You have configured PostgreSQL roles, grants, and RLS for production applications.
  • You’ve operated services in self-hosted or single-VM software stacks. For the most part this is not cloud-native work.
  • Your familiarity with Docker is at a level where you understand volumes and port mappings (the Guardian Connector stack uses CapRover, which runs apps on Docker Swarm).
  • You’ve worked with identity systems (Auth0, Keycloak, or similar).
  • You write design docs as a mode of working through architectural questions.
  • Empathy for non-technical users. You craft solutions for smart, fast learners who have limited experience with computers or smartphones. A listen-based, human-centered design process is at the heart of our work.
  • You can make and defend architectural calls under hard trade-offs, and you can do so collaboratively, bringing partners and teammates into the decision.
  • While LLMs are part of our toolkit (governed by human-first contributing guidelines), your work must be grounded in your own deep understanding of systems and sound technical judgement.

No specific formal educational credential is required. Relevant work history that demonstrates your growth and interest as a technologist is highly valued.

What you’ll do in the first year:

  • Improve the stack-deploy developer experience
    Today, spinning up a new instance involves long playbooks and scripts: provisioning Auth0 tenants and app keys, installing apps on CapRover, and wiring environment variables across services (this is mostly not a problem Terraform can solve). You will own and dramatically simplify the installation and first-time configuration of the Guardian Connector software stack. Improvements here benefit both external users who run their own instances and our internal team, which hosts the stack on behalf of partners.
  • Design and implement governed data access systems
    Guardian Connector runs on a single VM with an on-box SQL database and media storage. Partners want interfaces that enable controlled data sharing across internal and external consumers, including with third-party BI, GIS, and AI tools. You’ll help to design role-based access controls (RBAC), implement scoped or time-bound data credentials, and define clear boundaries between private, shared, and public data. Supporting this pillar is the metadata and data catalog work needed to make data discoverable and understandable to the people granting and using that access.
  • Develop AI and LLM capabilities that preserve data sovereignty
    Rather than baking specific AI features into Guardian Connector — which would make our team a bottleneck on every new model and tool — we believe the more flexible path is to let partners bring the AI tool of their choice to their own data, with those tools acting as consumers of the governed access layer above.  You’ll prototype and evaluate approaches such as local or self-hosted models, retrieval pipelines, and natural language interfaces that allow users to query and explore their data without external data leakage, and recommend one or two third-party tools we can endorse for partners.

Your work in your first year will help move Guardian Connector from active R&D into a phase focused on scaling adoption to more Indigenous partners.

Beyond 2026:

  • With most of Guardian Connector’s hard architectural problems solved, this role has room to expand into CMI’s bioacoustic monitoring product for wildlife conservation: a multi-tenant big-data software service.

We value engineers who are solution-oriented, comfortable collaborating across disciplines, and motivated by the broader purpose of the work. The tools you help build will be used by Indigenous communities with diverse technical backgrounds, so curiosity, clarity, reliability, and thoughtful design are essential.

Remote Work & Schedule

This position reports to the Director of Engineering and works closely with both software engineering and partner support teams. The role is remote, so comfort with asynchronous collaboration, clear written communication, and coordination across time zones is important.

This role frequently interacts with people in all US time zones and in Brazil.  Your work hours are flexible, but we will want to establish at least three recurring 3-hour time slots every week when you and the team are all available at the same time (Monday through Thursday, between 15:00-23:00 UTC / 10:00-17:00 Eastern).

To Apply

Conservation Metrics believes that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices, working together, increases our capacity to serve our customers and fulfill our mission.  Please apply to add your perspective and help us improve environmental and social justice outcomes.

To apply, please upload a resume and cover letter to https://forms.gle/bnZFN38kTLY8PxAz5 (login required; if you don’t have a Google Account, you may apply by email instead). If you have questions or any issues submitting this form, contact us at eng-apply@conservationmetrics.com.

Timeline: We are interviewing applicants effective immediately, and the position is open until filled.