Data Engineer

About Work on Climate

Work On Climate is a leading non-profit focused on building the workforce to solve climate change equitably and justly. You probably know us for our online community that has helped thousands of people find jobs and start companies, highlighted in most major business press, from Fast Company to New York Times. However, our work goes even farther: we are creating change in systems that produce the workforce in the first place – learn more about our approach in this deck.

Most of Work On Climate has been created by a nimble team of highly talented and dedicated volunteers. Supporting the workforce is a uniquely impactful climate solution that helps all other climate solutions, and by volunteering with our team, you can be on the leading edge of this critical work.

About the team

Today our Metrics & Data team is 7 total members from data engineering, data analyst, data visualization, and product backgrounds. We are geo located across Canada, US, Europe. Our standard meeting schedule is once a week, currently on Thursday @8:45am PST.

Our purpose

Our team is responsible for maintaining and evolving the data infrastructure and data products that provide data in a variety of formats used by WoCl teams for operational performance reporting, impact research, ad-hoc inquiries, and new emerging data-enabled pathways to understand and improve community impact.

Role Summary

Our team is growing so that we have the capacity and skills to meet the emerging data needs and mature our data architecture. This new role on the data engineering side of our team will bring hands on developer/data engineering experience to the team.

Time commitment

5 hours/week consistently for the next 6 months (or longer!).

What’s in it for me?

In addition to playing a critical role in enabling the WoCl community, you will get to:

• Build a strong climate network in your area of interest
• Collaborate with top-notch teammates passionate about climate
• Add a great line to your resume! Employers know and respect us.
• Work with an experienced, friendly, and diverse set of data engineers, data analysts, and product managers and learn from them.
• Gain experience constructing and scaling the foundations of our data infrastructure. Additionally, we encourage you to pick up new skills and learn from your teammates.

What will I do?

Data infrastructure is important for our ability to understand how our programs are performing, so we can make them better.

You’ll help the team design, create and transform data pipelines, schemas and data sets from varying sources to build performant, reliable, and maintainable data products.

You will play a central role in shaping and scaling Work on Climate’s data capabilities to help other teams make data informed decisions.

• With other team engineers – own, maintain and evolve WoCl’s data pipelines
• Connect data from WoCl’s software/tools to our database, Google Cloud SQL, through JavaScript (legacy), Python, Jupyter notebooks, and dbt
• Optimize scripts so they run efficiently, on time, and without failure
• With other engineers on the team, pilot emerging opportunities to leverage ML/AI for data analytics
• Review code of other data engineers
• Work on a small, creative, Agile metrics and data team
• Contribute to key decision-making as to the role of Metrics and Data team at Work on Climate, ensuring our tools, code, documentation and team scales effectively as WoCl does

What skills and commitment do I need?

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, or related roles (experienced data generalists welcome!)
  • Our current tech stack comprises JavaScript and Python for ingestion, Jupyter notebooks, dbt for transformations, MySQL for storage, and Looker Data Studio for dashboards (all running on Google Cloud with code in GitHub and a dash of GitHub Actions).
  • In 2025 data engineering team members are migrating away from JavaScript for ingestion towards automating ingestion and transformations via jupyter notebooks (using Python). In the future we may look to Mage as our orchestration framework, and transition data warehousing loads from MySQL to BigQuery.
• Ability to show up consistently and reliably for weekly calls to build relationships, carry project work forward, and brainstorm with the team required
• Excellent individual and group communication skills, ability to work with people of different work and communication styles

Common Challenges

• We are a start-up in our data maturity – we are still figuring out how to use data and how best to model and transform it to meet wider team needs. Some things we do might not make sense to you – we’ll welcome your suggestions on how to improve things!
• We have a number of data feeds and serve all the various volunteer teams’ needs. At the same time, we may not have developed documentation or onboarding processes, and our volunteer team crosses multiple time-zones. You will need to have patience and proactivity in getting up to speed.
• Our teams are expanding their programs and tools they use to serve the community. Helping them track adoption, engagement and success means advising them on their tool selection so that we can ensure we can extract and leverage the data they need to keep a pulse on community health and growth.
• Our data tech stack has grown “organically.” To ensure we can maintain and scale a robust and efficient data and development infrastructure, we need to strike a healthy balance of building on top of what we have to move fast and deliver incremental value, but also know when the time is to refactor or rethink our stack.

I’m interested! What do I do?

Yay! We’re excited to learn more about you. Please fill out this application form to tell us about your skills and interests in volunteering with our awesome team. If you are selected for an interview, our team will be in touch in 1-2 weeks.