CarbonPlan is a nonprofit research organization working on improving the transparency and scientific integrity of climate solutions with open data and tools. Our team analyzes the design and implementation of climate programs across the public and private sector. Our work focuses on three program areas: carbon offsets, carbon removal, and climate risks. In all three areas, we create public resources on climate solutions based on the best available science and data. You can read more about our work on our website.

Job announcement

The Open Source team at CarbonPlan uses software and data to advance climate action goals. The team lead's primary responsibility is to design and implement open source software engineering and data science solutions that support the organization’s program and policy work. The lead oversees our software development environment, plays a key role in setting our priorities for open source software, and establishes best practices for data management, data sharing, licensing, and reproducibility. This role also includes making contributions to climate-related open source ecosystems, through both existing grant-funded projects and, if interested, through pursuing new opportunities. The Open Source Lead reports to the Deputy Director and works closely with our Product team and researchers. If you are passionate about open source software, data engineering, and working on climate change, please apply!

You will:

• Provide technical leadership and hands-on collaboration to ensure all team members can execute on both simple and more ambitious projects involving data and software (browse our research work, data releases, and software documentation for examples).
• Design and manage best practices for a software stack built around scientific Python, cloud computing, cloud data storage (currently on Azure, AWS, and Google), and the Pangeo tool ecosystem (e.g., Jupyter, Zarr, Xarray, etc.); and for software that supports our web tools, including databases and REST APIs.
• Manage and mentor a small team of software and data engineers.
• Communicate, with support from our editorial team, our approaches to open source software through blog posts, podcasts, op-eds, etc., and act as a leader in the community advocating for open science practices.
• Identify opportunities for creating and contributing to the development of open source tools that are useful for our program work and also useful to the broader open source and climate research community (see, for example, our work on web-based mapping tools).
• Manage software development projects built in collaboration with external partners.
• As interest and time allows, identify and help pursue new grant-funded opportunities to contribute to open source and open science efforts relevant to climate research or the earth sciences (e.g., new libraries, formats, standards, etc.).