Software Engineer, Biodiversity Platforms

Title:

Software Engineer, Biodiversity Platforms

Supervisor:
Birds Plus Index Director

Location:

Remote (with travel as needed. All travel will be reimbursed.)

Salary:
Estimated at $117,000 - $130,000*;
Based on experience.

Final date to receive applications:
Open until filled

This is a full-time position with American Bird Conservancy (ABC). American Bird Conservancy is a fast-growing, results-focused nonprofit seeking employees with an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to make a difference for birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. Inspired by the wonder of birds, ABC achieves lasting results for the bird species most in need while also benefiting human communities, biodiversity, and the planet’s fragile climate.

ABC is seeking an exceptional Founding Software Engineer to design and build the first generation of a cloud-based biodiversity monitoring platform that will support conservation projects around the world. The platform will form a core component of the Birds Plus Index, a next-generation approach to measuring and monitoring the conservation value of working lands, restoration projects, and other landscapes using birds as indicators of ecological integrity.

The platform will enable organizations to securely store and analyze large volumes of wildlife recordings, automate biodiversity analyses, generate standardized ecological measurements, and ultimately support conservation decision-making and investment. The Software Engineer will build the computational infrastructure needed to transform how biodiversity is measured, interpreted, and communicated.

This is an opportunity to become the founding engineer of an ambitious new technology initiative at the intersection of conservation biology, machine learning, cloud computing, and product development. This is neither a traditional software engineering position nor a purely architectural role. The successful candidate will be a hands-on builder who can move comfortably between designing systems, writing production software, working with scientists and conservation practitioners, and determining what should be built next.

During the initial term of the position, the primary objective will be to design and implement a production-ready platform capable of supporting real conservation projects while establishing a technical foundation that can evolve into a much larger biodiversity intelligence system.

• Design, develop, deploy, and continuously improve the first production version of a cloud-based biodiversity monitoring platform.
• Design scalable, secure, maintainable, and cost-effective software architecture capable of supporting large acoustic datasets, automated biodiversity analyses, and future analytical products.
• Build production-quality backend services, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, and web applications for managing biodiversity data and delivering results to users.
• Develop cloud-native workflows for ingesting, organizing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of passive acoustic monitoring data.
• Design data models and software systems that support long-term ecological monitoring, including projects, users, deployments, recordings, species detections, metadata, and biodiversity measurements.
• Make pragmatic technology choices that balance robustness, simplicity, scalability, development speed, and long-term maintainability.

• Integrate existing and emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning models into automated biodiversity analysis pipelines.
• Develop infrastructure for running, monitoring, and improving automated wildlife sound-identification and other ecological analysis workflows.
• Design systems capable of incorporating new analytical models and data products as they emerge.
• Evaluate and recommend cloud services, software frameworks, AI technologies, and other technical approaches that can improve platform capabilities, scalability, and sustainability.
• Develop efficient approaches to storing, processing, and accessing large scientific and ecological datasets.

• Work directly with conservation scientists,…