The job is for a full-time contract and we are offering for this role between 25K - 40K Euros.
At this moment in time everyone at Vizzuality is working from home/remotely. If this type of flexibility is something you are looking for you will be very welcome to join us.
Regardless of your preferred location, and so we can make sure to keep our operations running smoothly, we would be particularly interested to hear from you if you are willing to overlap some/all of your day to day working hours with our teams. Ideally between GMT-3 and GMT+3.
Would you like to be part of Vizzuality’s story?
Are you motivated by the desire to help build a sustainable planet for all life on Earth? Are you looking for a new opportunity?
Vizzuality’s purpose is to reach a fair and sustainable planet by creating tools that radically empower people to make positive changes now.
We are a world-leading technology agency based in Madrid, Cambridge, and Porto. We design and develop data-driven tools and applications for international organisations who focus on Climate Change, Biodiversity and Inequality.
Solving such large and complex problems will bring you into contact with new technology and some of the world’s most interesting organisations and academics in machine learning, remote sensing, and planetary data. You’ll be working on projects like these:
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/
https://trase.earth/
https://resourcewatch.org/
https://www.half-earthproject.org/maps/
Our Culture “This is how we do things here”
Our aim is to help the world become a better place, therefore we need to make sure we care about our people and give them the power to build great things. These are some of the things that define our culture:
We Trust:
- Our team structure relies on self-organisation.
- We want to work with colleagues who don't have to look ‘up’ for approval, nor look ‘down’ and give instructions.
- As soon as you step inside, we will provide you with the best tools and technology, and then will trust you to do great things.
We Care:
- For ourselves, our colleagues, the organisation.
- We know what we do is important and we have a strong sense of responsibility for the work we do.
We Grow:
- As we are always embarking on new projects and challenges, a continuous learning mindset and a “Can Do” attitude is a must
- We are conscientious, we focus on learning and achieving our goals
- We give power to people so they can make decisions, to plot their own paths with help from all around them
We have fun:
- We also know that you need to balance seriousness with fun.
- If you can make people smile you will be off to a great start!
A day in the life of a Back End Engineer at Vizzuality
We’re looking for someone to work alongside a world class and super talented team of engineers, designers, researchers, scientists and project managers. Someone who is passionate about using their creativity and technical skills to make a difference in people’s lives, the environment and to help make the world a better place.
- You will be designing and developing cross-functional, multi-platform application systems to ingest, process, analyse and serve large amounts of data in the cloud, often in real time, and ensuring their craftsmanship, availability, resilience, and scalability.
- Working hands-on across our stack is one of the things Engineers at Vizzuality do the most.
- Our core stacks are NodeJS/TypeScript (with Express/Koa/NestJS as main frameworks depending on projects) and Ruby on Rails. You will be working on NodeJS/TypeScript projects and will also be experimenting with new technologies. If you don't know about a specific technology or get stuck on a tricky problem, you will always have someone around to help you learn and move forward.
- You will have the opportunity of taking ownership of projects and participating in meetings with clients at different stages of the development process in order to help define requirements, propose solutions and alternatives.
- A lot of your time will be spent liaising with data scientists, front-end engineers, project managers, and designers to find novel and creative technical solutions that solve specific client/project needs and integrate disparate technologies such as remote sensing, machine learning, image processing or statistical computing into public APIs
- You will also be communicating with users, colleagues, leading scientists and decision makers to collect requirements, describe features and technical designs, and define product strategy.
- Last but not least, our engineers ensure software quality, robustness, and compliance with standards by reviewing code, documenting, and creating automated tests.
These are some of the things you will be achieving in your first year at Vizzuality
In your first month:
- You’ll pair with your peers in the backend team so you get used to the way of doing things at Vizzuality.
- You’ll read documentation, write new features and participate in team meetings (weekly, with the possibility of daily stand ups on some projects).
- You’ll get to know people from the rest of the functional teams (science, design, front-end, business development) and development teams.
- At the end of your first month, you’ll be joining a longer project.
During the following months:
- You’ll develop ownership of the project you’ve been assigned to.
- You’ll write features, documentation, tests and fixes. You will be joining the back end work within your project team and with support from the back end functional group.
- You’ll also have opportunities to develop your skills around data-rich application engineering, cloud computing and data processing.
- Finally, you’ll participate in the definition of architectures and functional features for new project phases or new projects.
By the end of the first year:
- You’ll already have written several innovative features for ground-breaking projects with large real-world impact (we absolutely mean this!).
- You’ll be taking ownership of substantive features within larger backend projects.
These are some of the skills and experiences we are looking for in a candidate
We are looking for a person who has solid experience and proficiency in NodeJS/TypeScript.
As a backend engineer, familiarity with general server-side programming concepts and patterns and with designing and building APIs will be part of your core knowledge and expertise.
If you think you don't tick all the boxes within the list below, we'd still love to hear from you. Nobody checks every box, and we are looking for someone excited to join the team and aligned with our purpose! So if you think you have production experience across some/all of the areas below, we would love to hear more about it!
- For some of our projects we use a Rails stack and for others (especially data-related components) we use Python: working knowledge of Rails or Python would be a plus.
- Experience with the full life cycle of a project, including production deployments, and at least medium sized code bases.
- You have used SQL and/or document-based datasets in production projects
- You are familiar with Docker or ther container technologies for development environments and for production deployments.
- You have experience developing services and components within larger, modular architectures such as microservices systems.
- You have experience using cloud APIs in your code (e.g. cloud storage, cloud functions, etc.).
Self Management Skills: Below you will find some characteristics that make people successful in an organisation like ours:
- Motivation: The ambition to excel in the pursuit of unselfish, collective goals; deep personal humility and a focus on self improvement.
- Curiosity: The instinct to seek new experiences, knowledge and feedback with an openness to learning and change.
- Insight: The ability to gather and make sense of information that suggests new possibilities.
- Engagement: The capacity to use emotion and reason to communicate a persuasive vision and connect with people.
- Determination: The ability to fight for difficult goals despite challenges.
Compensation, Benefits & Growth “This is what you get when you join Vizzuality”
Our compensation and benefits are part of a great career opportunity with the potential for you to grow and work in something with a massive transformational purpose. So if you really care about the real-world impact of your work and are inspired by our mission to transform the world, we can offer you:
Compensation & Benefits:
- A competitive salary. We are offering for this role between 25 - 40K Euros. This range it's only an indication and we will agree together your final salary based on your specific experience.
- A yearly bonus up to 10% of the salary, depending on the company's performance and your own.
- If you are based in Spain or Portugal, you will get Health & Dental Insurance subsidised by the company.
- 22 Holiday Days + 1 Day for your birthday
Work and Personal Life Integration:
- We have a remote-friendly culture with teammates located across four countries and 10 cities. We run all our meetings online, and create opportunities for the online experience to be better every day.
- We offer a flexible work environment and flexible hours, and as long as you do what you have to do, meet your objectives and coordinate accordingly with your team, we are not so worried if you work at the office, in a coffee shop, on your sofa at home, or at the beach!
Learning and working on new and interesting things is fun so we offer many opportunities to do so:
- Get your hands-on cool technology and applications to do your work, communicate, and build great things
- You will work alongside a talented team of engineers, designers, and scientists with multiple backgrounds and skills
- Peer mentoring
- You will have the freedom to design a career path that suits your interests and growth needs.
- Support for giving talks and contributing to open source projects/initiatives that align with Vizzuality
Recruitment Process Overview
Do you have what it takes to change the world? If after reading the description of the role, you like our culture and you believe you have what it takes to join Vizzuality, please send us your application.
This is how the recruitment process looks like and also some suggestions for you to include and consider in your application.
Application: Dec 22nd - Jan 10th
- Send us your CV and Cover Letter, explaining why you would like to work with us and what you can bring to the team. Please include any samples of your code and projects you find relevant to the offer.
- Fluent English is really important to us, so if it’s not your first language please demonstrate your abilities in your CV and Cover Letter.
First Screener: 25th Jan - 5th Feb
- This is a 60 minute informal interview so you can get to know a bit better the company, our culture and ask any questions about the role and our ways of working.
- From our side, we are interested in understanding more about what you are looking for and what you care about.
Coding Challenge: 8th - 19th Feb
- We will invite you to complete an assignment to understand more how you work, reason and solve problems through a challenge.
- We will send you via email a challenge for you to think about, and then we will ask you to send us your ideas back.
Interview: 22nd - 26th Feb.
- You will be meeting with a few of us and we will deep-dive into your background, experience and skills. We will be also reviewing and discussing your Coding Challenge together.
- This will be another opportunity for you to ask us questions about the role and the company.
Informal Catch Up with the Team: w/c 1st March
- During the last stage of the process the idea is to offer you a final opportunity to get to know more people on the team (not just Back End) so you can make a more informed decision.
- You will be meeting online people from different areas/levels/countries, so you can get an idea of what different people in the company do, how we organise ourselves, our typical day to day, or any other info you may want to get first hand
Thank you for your interest in employment with Vizzuality.
Vizzuality is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
Vizzuality respects the privacy of our applicants for employment. We take reasonable steps to safeguard and protect any private and personally identifiable information you submit through this website in connection with your application for employment.
