Data Engineering Team Lead

About Work on Climate

Work on Climate (WoCl) is a leading non-profit focused on mobilizing humanity’s talent to build a regenerative green economy.

You probably know us for our online community, the largest in the world of its sort, 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 far beyond helping people find jobs: we believe that professionals have the power to transform their companies, industries, and communities.

About the team

Our Data Infrastructure team builds the data infrastructure for Work On Climate.

That means collecting, organizing, and analyzing data about our members, community activity, and programs. Program teams use this data both for understanding program performance and for implementing effective programs for our members.

We are geo located across Canada, US, Europe, and our standard meeting schedule is once a week, currently on Tuesday @ 9am PST (UTC-8).

Role Summary

We’re looking for an experienced, dependable, highly technical volunteer Data Engineering Team Lead to steer this team’s technical direction and coordinate implementation.

Time commitment

This role is highly impactful and rewarding, but we want to be upfront that success in this role requires a high level of sustained commitment:

• 10 hours/week consistently for a minimum of 6 months, including the ability to join our weekly meeting on Tuesdays @ 9am PST (UTC-8).
• Being consistently available and responsive to your teammates and leadership on a daily basis, so that the team’s coordination is not bottlenecked by the lead’s absence.

What will I do?

You will be leading an all-volunteer data engineering team that implements and maintains our data infrastructure.

• Manage the team: Coordinate work, motivate volunteers, keep people accountable to their commitments, recruit new volunteers when needed, pitch in with hands-on work as needed to keep the work progressing
• Guide technical direction of the work, serve as a technical expert whose architectural guidance (and decisions, where needed) the team can trust
• Champion adoption of new tools, practices, and ways of working, including AI-assisted engineering and data science workflows
• Work with our founder Eugene to keep the team’s direction responsive to the organization’s evolution

What skills and personal qualities make for a fit?

Skills and track record:

• 5+ years professional experience in data engineering, including team management, project management, and individual coding work.
• Experience with several of: GCP, Typescript, python, dbt, Hex, dagster – or tools serving an equivalent purpose.
• “AI-native” in your own development workflow, actively following emerging AI tools and frameworks
• Big plus: Experience with implementing systems that include ML serving and evaluation workflows, or LLM-powered systems such as chatbots and search tools
• A track record of being the driving force of adoption of new tools, practices, and ways of working on teams you’ve been part of
• Previous experience leading all-volunteer teams strongly preferred

Personal qualities – among your peers, you have a reputation for:

• Being extremely dependable, with a track record of sustaining multi-month commitments based purely on internal motivation (rather than external accountability).
• Being extremely pragmatic and able to translate a high-level vision into nimble practical steps.
• Being very comfortable with direct but kind feedback/accountability/disagreement – both giving and receiving; with leadership, peers, and team members alike; with people of different working styles.
• Being someone who has mastered “the art of getting to the most important point”: being able to explain a complex topic to someone, and learn something complex even from someone who is less good at explaining.

Common Challenges

• By far the biggest challenge for any team lead is their own availability and the availability of volunteers on their team. Many people bite off more than they can chew, and circumstances change. It is extremely important that you are able to navigate these situations through the full management toolkit: clear and timely communication, careful recruiting, clear expectations, delegation, motivation, accountability, etc.
• Given that this team is all-volunteer, we have to build the simplest thing that can possibly work. That requires a high level of technical judgment about what is high-leverage AND what is buildable and maintainable with our resources.
• Our stack includes a variety of tools that change from time to time (e.g. right now we are adopting AI-assisted engineering + data science tools and moving from Javascript to Python). It is unlikely that any given person has extensive experience with all of them. Ability to learn new tools exceptionally quickly, and with minimal/no guidance, is a disproportionately important factor for success on this team.

What’s in it for me?

Our most impactful volunteers are internally motivated, and help this work because they believe in our mission and see how their work makes a difference.

This data infrastructure helps our program teams understand what works and enables new types of data-driven programs. Your work will help more of our members make a difference for climate through their work, and find the right invaluable work relationships.

However, if you are choosing between several impactful opportunities, consider that:

• You will get to lead and be part of a team different from teams you’ve led before, and deepen your leadership skills.
• You will learn a lot from your teammates and the way we do things, and teach us a lot, too. Our volunteers note that the way we run things here is exceptional for a mostly-volunteer organization. It’s a lot of fun.
• You will be part of a work culture that several of our volunteers have described as “a healing experience”, compared to the culture they are part of in their day jobs.
• We have each other’s back. We will support you – both in this role and on your personal path to working in climate.

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 interest in volunteering with our awesome team. If you are selected for an interview, our team will be in touch in 1-2 weeks.