Ruby on Rails Engineer – Biodiversity / Conservation
Location: Hybrid, Cambridge 2 days per week (ideally, maybe more flexibility)
Salary: £50K – £62K + 12% pension, life insurance and more.
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Are you someone who loves our planet and wants to do good in a role with a biodiversity-focused global organisation?
Would you like to do more with your technical skills? Are you somebody who’s dreamed of working to support and connect people and systems for the benefit of species conservation? Read on.
Thankfully, as you read this there are organisations already working on deeply detailed and technical systems aimed at recovering and regenerating ecosystems. These are essential in promoting collaboration and preventing biodiversity loss or limiting loss in scenarios where it is unavoidable.
These systems range from databases on endangered species and key biodiversity areas to things like tracking pollution, monitoring species and the recovery of regions or sites. They are integrated into companies, governments and organisations all over the world and help all to understand how ecosystems interact and influence one another and how we, as humans, can protect them.
A passion for nature or the environment more broadly will serve you well here, as a conservation org. they are hyper-focused on impact and making their work accessible, integrating partners and customers into their platform to expand who is making use of this data for decision-making.
The CIO here has real ambitions to see the tech evolve across this 2,000+ people org with ~10 regional offices and teams spread more broadly than that across biodiversity hotspots (physical & political). That includes hardware, software, data science, and the whole shebang.
So what will you be doing specifically?
Building and maintaining the tech foundation that underpins a key database and platform. This will include investigating issues and implementing fixes to build in resilience and remove points of failure. You’ll also bring documentation up to standard; much was completed by consultants and wasn’t always updated by internal members of the team so there is some work to do in enabling the evolution of this platform and this may include switching to Python and Django or other technologies in the longer-term – 2+ years.
The skills priorities are Ruby on Rails and exp building APIs, exp with geospatial data and GIS tools is highly desirable. The role will be 80:20 backend : frontend, with some infrastructure and security tasks in there.
There are a number of partners who collaborate on various other interlinked tools, so cross-team collaboration exp will be beneficial. If you’ve touched on security or some DevOps tools and cloud technologies, but not extensively, there is support to grow your knowledge – in the form of partners/teammates and funding for courses, textbooks or other materials if needed.
It’s a small team of ~5, including the systems manager, that is part of a broader conservation tech ecosystem of 5-6 other teams and systems that occasionally collaborate or share resources, including with some of those partner orgs.
You’ll be involved with the design, review code and work closely with, scientists, ecologists, and climate researchers, prioritise work and engage some stakeholders or 3rd parties, also some internal teams such as GIS and data analysts and program managers to support them in delivering projects across various tiers of the conservation sector.
Interested in addressing biodiversity loss and turning things around? Do say hello! 🙂
