Climate Mitigation Data Engineer: Building Climate Solutions for Cities

Lisbon, Portugal

Climate Mitigation Data Engineer: Building Climate Solutions for Cities

Link to application: https://noteforms.com/forms/climate-data-engineer-job-application-cihkkr

Have you built a solid career in data engineering and now want your work to actually matter?

Open Earth Foundation is a California-based nonprofit on a mission to create groundbreaking technology that helps combat the climate crisis.

Our climate platforms support cities around the world with data-driven climate planning and delivery.

We’re a diverse, global team working remotely and collaborating with partners worldwide to make real change possible.

With strong funding and a powerhouse team of innovators, we’re ready to tackle big challenges for a resilient Earth for generations to come and we need the planet’s brightest minds to help solve them!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

As a Climate Mitigation Data Engineer at Open Earth Foundation, you build the data cities use to plan, act on and track their climate goals. That starts with greenhouse-gas inventories cities can trust, and runs through estimating what each action could cut, to monitoring progress and reporting it.

Cities need to know where their emissions come from, report them to frameworks such as the GHG Protocol for Cities (GPC) and CDP, and track progress over time. You own that mitigation record: the methods, the inputs, and the models behind the numbers.

A Data Platform Engineer owns the shared warehouse and the pipeline platform. You decide whether a calculation is right, which dataset it should use, and where the gaps are. Together you put that domain on a platform other Digital Service applications can use. Colleagues on the data team cover climate risk and adaptation. This role is focused on mitigation.

This is a mid-level role. You ship datasets and reviewed methods with your manager. You are not expected to design the warehouse architecture.

This position is fully remote and international as our organization works across different time zones.

Schedule flexibility is expected with a willingness to collaborate in overlapping core hours for meetings from 8am PST to 11am PST (GMT-8).
Availability to work with overlapping hours across U.S., Latin American and European time zones is preferred.
Experience with asynchronous remote work and the ability to self-organize tasks is preferred.

Priority will be given to applications submitted by November 15th.

The following requirements describe our ideal candidate. If you don't meet some of the requirements, you're encouraged to apply anyway. Let us know if there is something missing and how we can work together to make it up.

Essential Functions and Specific Duties:

Design and maintain the data models for emissions inventories, activity data, emission factors, sources, and methodologies
Build and run pipelines that ingest national, global, and city-provided datasets into those models, with tests, versioning, and clear lineage
Review technical methodologies for emissions calculations: check the logic, data inputs, assumptions, and global-warming-potential choices, and flag gaps
Encode reporting rules so outputs align with the GPC and with other frameworks cities submit to, including CDP where relevant
Snapshot factors and methods onto results so a historical inventory stays reproducible when a catalogue changes later
Set data-quality checks and compare results against independent sources
Document data models, pipelines, and methods so partners and colleagues can follow how every number was produced
Work with the Systems Data Engineer so domain models land in the shared warehouse as contracts, not as a private schema
Support cities and partners with emissions profiles and with questions about where a number came from
Use AI tools for dataset discovery, cleaning, documentation, and method review, and check the output before it is used

Other:

Actively participate in team building and culture development activities at Open Earth Foundation

Qualifications:

5+ years in data engineering or a closely related role
Strong Python and SQL
Working knowledge of greenhouse-gas accounting frameworks, such as the GHG Protocol for Cities (GPC) or IPCC methods
Solid understanding of relational databases and schema design (for example PostgreSQL)
Experience with at least one pipeline or orchestration tool (for example dbt, Airflow, Dagster, Mage, or similar)
Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and data warehouses (for example BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or PostgreSQL used as an analytical store)

Nice to have

Hands-on experience building or reviewing city or national emissions inventories
Emission-factor catalogues, notation keys (IE, NE, NO, C), and data-quality tiers
Familiarity with GPC sectors, scopes, and BASIC / BASIC+ reporting levels
CDP, Common Reporting Format, or eCRF reporting
Geospatial data and tools (PostGIS, GeoPandas) for allocating activity data to cities
Hands-on use of AI tools or LLMs in data workflows
A MSc or PhD in Environmental Science, Climate Science, Environmental Engineering, Data Science, or a related field is highly desirable, particularly with research experience in greenhouse-gas accounting, emissions modeling, or climate data systems.

Interpersonal Skills:

Explains technical methods in plain language to non-technical colleagues, cities, and partners
Works well with external partners such as research institutions and climate networks, including C40, the Global Covenant of Mayors, and CDP
Collaborates closely with the Systems Data Engineer, and with full-stack, AI, design, and product teams, helping shape how emissions data shows up in products
Comfortable saying when a number is not ready to publish, and what would make it ready

Compensation and Benefits:

This position is full-time with compensation of $55,000 to $70,000/year (USD), dependent on experience and location
Open Earth offers unlimited paid time off, paid holidays and paid sick leave
You will work remotely within a dynamic and international environment
We celebrate our achievements during our annual team retreat

OEF is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, age, religion, national origin, or any other protected characteristic. We celebrate diversity, equity, and inclusion in our teams and believe people should align their work with their purpose. Join us if you love Earth.

We look forward to hearing from you!

We use AI-assisted tools to help organize and summarize application materials. All hiring decisions are reviewed and made by people.