Job Description
About Us
At Saildrone, we sustainably explore, map, and monitor the oceans to understand, protect, and preserve our world. We provide real-time access to critical data from any ocean on earth, 24/7/365, and use proprietary software applications to transform that data into actionable insights and intelligence. Our fleet of uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs), powered by renewable wind and solar power, have a minimal carbon footprint and operate without the need for a crewed support vessel. Saildrone works with governments, civil agencies, foundations, universities, and private companies around the globe to drive better information about our oceans and seas-from sailing into the eye of a category 4 hurricane to obtain new data about how storms intensify, collecting new CO2 data in hard-to-reach areas, and counting fish biomass to inform sustainable fishery management, to mapping the ocean floor and reducing illegal fishing and drug trafficking. As a result of our work, Saildrone has been included on Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, earned an Ocean Awards’ Innovation Award, won Best Tech For Good from the Timmy Awards, and was recognized by Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism 50 list of the Top 50 Companies Kickstarting American Renewal. Our first-annual Atlantic hurricane mission with NOAA was included as one of The New York Times’ 21 Things That Happened for the First Time in 2021 and Popular Science’s 100 Greatest Innovations of 2021.
We are based in Alameda, CA, with offices in Washington DC and St. Petersburg, FL, and operate our missions worldwide. Saildrone is backed by top-tier investors in the frontier tech and sustainability sectors, including Social Capital, Capricorn, Lux Capital, BOND Capital, and Emerson Collective.
This is an exciting opportunity with a fast-growing team at the cutting-edge intersection of big data services and autonomous hardware. You will be an integral part of a high-performing multi-disciplinary delivering high impact for humanity and future generations.
The Role
As the Software Engineering Manager of Saildrone’s Data team, you will partner with teams from across the organization to continue to develop and evolve the foundation of our cloud data pipeline.
You will be joining the team at an opportune moment to have a high impact. We anticipate orders of magnitude growth in real-time data bandwidth from our deployed drones.
As a leader for this team, your background in data pipelines will be essential to enable you to hit the ground running. You will help set the strategic engineering vision for the team while executing product development priorities through quarterly and sprint planning. We are looking for a leader that can help mentor and level up engineering talent, as well as align and empower individual contributors. Engagement with cross-functional teams of product managers, technical program managers, other software engineers and infrastructure engineers will be essential for success.
Required Skills and Experience
- Bachelors or Masters degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, or other related field plus relevant experience.
- 5+ years of relevant data engineering experience in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.)
- 2+ years of software engineering management
- Working knowledge of Athena, BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, or Vertica data querying technologies
- Working knowledge of relational databases (Postgres)
- Familiar with Argo, Airflow, or Dagster workflow orchestration engines
- Strong written and verbal communication skills including the ability to lead discussions, contribute during code reviews, and capture tasks.
- Excellent troubleshooting skills and great attention to detail.
- Experience with agile development practices.
Desired skills and experience
- NoSQL experience – DynamoDB, Redis, Influx, Timescale
- Experience working with time series, geospatial, geo-temporal, or map-tile data would be a huge bonus
- Experience with data from drones or robots, such as those from ROS-based systems, would also be very helpful
- Expertise in Python or NodeJS programming languages
- Familiar with Parquet or Protobuf data file formats
- Experience with serverless functions, such as AWS Lambda
- Knowledge of visualization tools such as Jupyter Notebooks and Streamlit
- Experience with developing and deploying distributed services with Docker
- Experience with Ansible or Salt for executing commands on remote systems
- Built data pipelines for Machine Learning applications
Please note: We are interested in speaking with candidates that have diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
If you don’t meet all the criteria above but are excited about the position, we encourage you to apply. Nobody checks all the boxes; we are looking for someone with passion and drive who is excited for a challenge.
Location: This position is in Alameda, CA (Hybrid). Our waterfront office offers beautiful views of San Francisco Bay in always sunny Alameda. Even our walls have good karma, our offices mix software development with a hardware production line in the former airplane hangar used to film ‘The Matrix’.
Physical Requirements: Work is performed on a computer and requires ability to operate a keyboard and other peripheral devices.
Benefits:
- Medical, dental and vision plans for you and your dependents.
- Short and relaxing ferry ride from the Ferry Building for SF residents
- Enhanced Parental Leave Programs
- Competitive benefits including excellent medical, life insurance, 401k plan
A reasonable estimate of the current range is $190,000-$220,000 annually.
Catch up on the latest news about us:
The Tiny Craft Mapping Superstorms at Sea – The New York Times
Saildrone Takes the Wraps Off its Voyager Autonomous Research Vehicle – TechCrunch
An Underwater Mountain was Newly Discovered off California Coast – San Francisco Chronicle
The Quest for CO2: You Can’t Capture What You Can’t Find – Inside Unmanned Systems
Hacking the Anthropocene with Survivalist Robots [VIDEO] – Freethink
Here’s What Hurricane Fiona’s Surf Looked Like, from Atop a 50-foot Wave – The Washington Post
An Unprecedented View Inside a Hurricane – EOS
Meet the sailing robots trying to solve climate change – The Hill
They Sailed Into a Hurricane, Now These Unmanned Saildrones are Seeking Data on Our Carbon Uptake – CNN
Saildrone Featured Videos Playlist
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
Individual compensation packages are based on geographic location, scope of the role, relevant experience, and the ability to deal with complexity and problem solve within our organization, among other factors
Individuals who require employer sponsorship to remain employed in the United States now or in the future will not be considered for hire for certain positions.
Any unsolicited resumes/candidate profiles submitted through our website or to personal email accounts of employees of Saildrone are considered property of Saildrone and are not subject to payment of agency fees.
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