Senior Full Stack Engineer

THIS ROLE IS AVAILABLE IN SPAIN AND ITALY ONLY - FULLY REMOTE

About the Varda Foundation

The Varda Foundation is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to accelerating the transition to more sustainable agricultural systems and a healthier global food ecosystem. We focus on unlocking the value of environmental and scientific data, especially soil and natural resource data, by building open digital infrastructure that fosters collaboration across governments, researchers, farmers, and institutions. Our mission is to create digital public goods that support climate resilience, better land use decisions, and long-term food system sustainability.

We are a small, distributed, and passionate team working at the intersection of technology, environmental science, and agriculture. If you want to build meaningful technology with lasting impact, this is the place!

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who is excited to work across the stack and make geospatial and scientific data more accessible and useful. In this role, you’ll design and develop tools that support collaborations between governments, scientists, farmers, and institutions, public and private.

You’ll join a multidisciplinary team and collaborate closely with our product designer, soil scientists, fellow engineers, and product manager. You’ll contribute to everything from UX/UI and data models to infrastructure and deployment. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy autonomy, value clean, scalable solutions, and are motivated by mission-driven work.

What You’ll Work On

• Front-end applications that display and manage geospatial and environmental data
• Systems that store and retrieve large volumes of scientific and satellite data
• Secure data access, user permission models, and authentication flows
• Infrastructure for deployment, data ingestion, and continuous delivery
• Public APIs for data access and integrations with external systems

What You’ll Do

• Build new features end-to-end from React components to API endpoints and database models
• Help design the architecture of our core data and application platform
• Improve the performance, availability, and observability of our services
• Contribute to and help refine our internal engineering practices and documentation
• Ensure the scalability, security, and stability of the software you build
• Contribute to open-source projects and our broader digital public goods strategy

What We’re Looking For

We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and actively encourage candidates from underrepresented communities in tech and science to apply.

Essential skills & experience:

• Solid software engineering fundamentals and experience designing systems
• Full-stack development experience, including both SSR and CSR frontends
• Strong backend development experience, including API design and database interaction
• Experience with both relational (PostgreSQL) and document-based databases
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and containerization tools
• Comfortable working independently in a remote, asynchronous environment
• Strong problem-solving ability, you enjoy turning vague problems into concrete solutions

Nice to have (bonus):

• Experience working with geospatial data (e.g. PostGIS, GIS tools)
• Experience with open-source contributions or managing open-source projects

Our Tech Stack

We don’t expect you to know everything already but here’s what we use day to day:

• Languages: TypeScript (frontend & backend), Python
• Frontend: React
• Backend: Express (Node.js), Flask
• Databases: PostgreSQL + PostGIS, ElasticSearch
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
• DevOps: Jenkins, Docker, Argo CD

Why Join Us?

• Purpose-driven work: Build tools that support environmental sustainability and global food security
• Collaborative culture: Join a thoughtful, caring, and diverse team of technologists and scientists
• Global impact: Your work will be open-source and designed for use by international partners
• Technical ownership: Autonomy and input into the full product and platform lifecycle
• Remote flexibility: Work from anywhere policy to support flexibility and wellbeing