Sep 13, 2024 - Overstory is hiring a remote VP Engineering. đź“ŤLocation: USA, UK, Canada, France, Estonia, Portugal, Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain.
Working to solve our climate crisis is the most important mission of our time, and the most exciting problem to be working on. Overstory’s mission is to help solve our climate crisis by providing real-time intelligence about the planet’s vegetation. In our first step toward this mission, we are applying machine learning to satellite imagery to track forests and vegetation. Today, we proudly partner with 40+ leading utilities worldwide, including 4 of the top 10 US utilities, to help reduce wildfire risk and increase grid reliability to prevent power outages.
We have already proven our business model and we’re all united behind our ambitious vision to scale up this model to help humanity and the planet. We closed a $14 million Series A, led by B Capital and welcoming The Nature Conservancy to our collective of climate-minded investors. This milestone includes additional investment and continued support from Convective Capital, Semapa Next, Bentley iTwin Ventures, Pale blue dot, CapitalT, Moxxie Ventures, and Overwater VenturesÂ
If you want to have a real impact and solve some of the world's most complex challenges with advanced technology, come work with our talented and passionate team. Overstory is a remote-first company, with people living all over the U.S. and Europe.
The role
The VP Engineering of Overstory will build and lead a world class engineering team that is helping to reduce the risk of wildfires and power outages around the world every day. This is an amazing opportunity for an experienced engineering leader who wants to work in climate tech.
We’re building cutting edge technology in a remote sensing universe where innovation is happening every day. It’s exciting, mission-driven work but there are a lot of unknowns, so this isn’t a job for a person who is uncomfortable with the unknown. We want someone with deep experience who is also excited to build something completely new using bold, creative approaches. You need to be comfortable juggling the needs of an existing, successful business while building for the future, and you need to act with a sense of urgency toward both.Â
As we enter a new phase of explosive growth for the company, the VPE will be responsible for articulating a compelling technical strategy and developing the top notch team that can effectively execute that strategy. We’re looking for an entrepreneurial and people-centric leader with a track record of leading technical teams through change and growth with a mix of boldness, empathy and clarity.
What a successful candidate looks like
You’re a sophisticated, experienced people leader who has a proven ability to lead technical teams through big changes. You know how to inspire teams with an exciting vision while offering them the hands-on support to get to the other side. This job is not for someone who doesn’t want to get their hands dirty with the hard work of leading change.Â
You have a strong network to tap and you are bold in your recruiting. You’re not afraid to hire people who know more than you, to stretch for top talent and you understand that recruiting is a top priority that requires constant networking and attention. You will build a diverse team that has a high performing, inclusive, and caring culture.
You’re a strategic, systems-level thinker who can zoom up to lay out a 12-24 month technical strategy. But you can also zoom down so that you can make decisions and guide the team on day-to-day trade-offs that need to be made. You’re product- and customer-centric in your approach to organizing your team and building new technology.
You’re a business-minded tech leader who is a bridge-builder across the company. You can take complicated technical concepts and communicate them clearly to a less technical audience.
What you'll do
- Build a high-performing and diverse engineering team that works remotely from multiple countries, and across multiple time zones.
- Lead the development of all of Overstory’s technology, including the analyses we ship to customers on a daily basis, our software product, our ML models, the internal tools we use to manage the human-in-the-loop inputs and the platform that underlies it all.
- Articulate a technical strategy for the next 12-24 months.
- Help define and execute against company-wide OKRs.
- Set up highly productive cross-functional teams that ship a high quality product on a daily basis.Â
- Foster an inclusive culture where everyone can do their best work.
- Create strong lines of communication within your team and with other key parts of the business.
About you
Traits we value:
- Boldness: you’re not afraid to make hard decisions or take risks, and you always act with urgency.Â
- Mission-driven: you care deeply about building great products that help tackle our climate crisis.
- Empathy: you can attract and develop a diverse team, and you are inclusive in your approach to leadership.Â
- Listening: you make people feel heard.
- Curiosity: learning excites you and you’re not afraid to admit what you don’t know.
- Clarity: You’re a simplifier, not a complicator, and you can communicate clearly without using jargon.Â
- Collaborative spirit: team above ego and you’re never afraid to get your hands dirty.
Experience we value:
- You have managed a team of 50+ people.
- You have been on a startup journey from Seed stage through to Series B or later, and you know how to scale a team successfully through those transitions.
- You have experience working on a complex, machine learning-based product. Bonus points for geospatial or remote sensing experience.
- You have a deep understanding of software development processes and are product-centric in the way you think about building technology.
- You have experienced the value of cross-functional teams where engineering, product and design work side-by-side.
- You have managed remote teams.
- You have managed global teams.
What you get
- To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis.
- Flexible working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our work days around our lives, not the other way around.
- Other benefits like a remote working budget, an educational budget and time to develop new skills.
- To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance and respect.
- Equity and a competitive salary.
About our teamÂ
We are a group of 62 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, Spain, France, Sweden and Canada. We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.Â
Diversity & Inclusion
We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.
We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the nine people on our leadership team are female, 46% of the overall team are female and 20% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks fifteen languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Indonesian, Cantonese, Estonian and Korean.
Our values
Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.
We act with urgency.
Our curiosity fuels our growth.
We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.
We’re rooted in diversity.
Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.
We care for each other.
We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.
Trust is fundamental.
We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.
