Lead Engineer (Python) - Assessment Platform

London
Engineering /
Full-time /
Hybrid
What is Sylvera anyway? ‍👩‍👨🌳
Sylvera provides carbon data for genuine climate impact. Our mission is to incentivize investment in real climate action. 

Purchasing credits through the carbon markets is one of the most established and scalable ways to channel finance from the private sector to effective climate solutions and work toward societal net zero. Unfortunately, the voluntary carbon markets have been plagued with mistrust and a lack of effectiveness since they’ve emerged – until Sylvera. 

To help organizations ensure they're making the most effective investments, Sylvera builds software that independently and accurately automates the evaluation of carbon projects that capture, remove, or avoid emissions. With Sylvera's data and tools, businesses and governments can confidently invest in, benchmark, deliver, and report real climate impact. 

Our team is made up of leading minds in climate change from scientists to policy, finance and carbon market experts. We work in partnership with scientific organisations, universities, governments and think tanks to develop and test rigorous and holistic ratings methodologies, leveraging the latest technology. Founded in 2020, Sylvera has 150+ employees across the world with offices in London, New York, Belgrade and Singapore. We’ve raised over $96million from leading VCs like Balderton Capital, Index Ventures and Insight Partners to date. 

What will I be doing? ‍‍👩‍💻👨‍💻

The Assessment Platform team is critical to ensure Sylvera can scale. Assessment Platform enables efficient and compliant ratings creation through technology-driven solutions. Working with internal teams, you will be building systems to help automate how we create ratings of carbon offset projects.

Work varies from hackathons with subject matter experts to create frameworks for new ratings project methodologies, to pairing with other engineers to build key underlying infrastructure. You’ll have the opportunity to learn so much about carbon offset projects as well as growing and improving our tech. 

This position is ideal for someone who’s looking to make a large impact and lead engineers to make sure we can scale our Ratings product. 

Specific responsibilities will include:
- Managing a team of engineers and inspiring others to work towards the team’s mission of enabling efficient and compliant ratings creation
- Designing, building and maintaining backend systems to automate our ratings creation processes
- Creating a culture in the team where everyone feels able to constructively challenge and learn from others
- Sharing knowledge with technical and non-technical stakeholders through demos
- Contributing to the development of internal APIs
- Connecting data sources to our data platform so that it can easily be consumed by our customer apps
- Implementing robust logging and alerting infrastructureEnabling other teams to work smarter and automate the boring stuff

We’re looking for someone who: 🧠💚
- Has experience leading a small team or is a senior engineer with experience leading projects looking to make a step up into managing engineers whilst remaining hands on
- Is a backend engineer with strong foundational data knowledge
- Focuses on user experience and how to delight both internal and external customers
- Has demonstrable experience in building backend systems and is excited about creating a big impact
- Wants to mentor others on best practices on the intersection of backend and data engineering
- Cares deeply about the climate and ecosystems of the earthIs a self-starter who thrives in constantly evolving environments, ideally with early-stage experience

Take a look at Anastasia’s day in the life article here. She’s a Senior Data Engineer working in Ratings Production Tech and someone you’d be working with closely. 

In case you’re interested, our tech stack is as follows (not necessary for you to have experience in all of these):
- Python: this is our bread and butter - all of our Airflow DAGs are written in Python as well as our ratings generation package
- Terraform/ AWS - as we're developing infrastructure, we try to make it as abstract and modular as possible so it can be reused in the future
- SQL/ dbt
- Snowflake
We’d like someone highly ambitious, motivated and eager to propel their career forward. We prioritise grit, positivity, and the willingness to get stuck in, and encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't exactly match this job description

Benefits 💰
- Equity in a rapidly growing startup
- Private Health Insurance and Life Assurance 
- Unlimited annual leave - and encouragement to actually use it!
- Enhanced parental leave 
- Up to 20 days paid sick leave 
- £500 WFH allowance 
- No corners cut in having the best tech to do your job
- Access to Mental Health support via Spill
- Monthly team socials

Location 🌍 
UK (with access to an office in London if you wanted to come in) 

Our Values 🙌
Own it: We make new mistakes. We build on the momentum of our wins and reflect on and learn from our failures.
Stay curious: We keep our focus on the long-term, even if that means short-term challenges.
Do what’s right - even when it’s hard: We take a growth mindset to our work, our customers, our market and the opportunities ahead of us. 
Collaborate and challenge with empathy: Our teams deliver through active collaboration. We invest in each others’ success and make the company stronger in the long-run.
Empower Customers: Make extraordinary efforts to exceed our customer expectations. If we’re serving our customers to the fullest, we can help direct more investment into real climate impact.

What if you’re a partial fit? 🌱
We prioritise grit, positivity, and the willingness to get stuck in, and encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't exactly match this job description. 

Equal employment opportunity 🌈
Sylvera is an equal opportunity employer: we value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.