Mid-level Developer

About AcornAcorn is on a mission to empower smallholder farmers globally, turning climate action into farmer income through agroforestry. We currently work with 600,000 farmers in more than 15 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. That income comes from the sale of carbon credits, generated by the trees the farmers plant on their land. The Data & Tech team is looking for a Mid-level Developer. You will be working alongside data scientists, data engineers, developers and forestry specialists. The team is responsible for generating the credits according to the methodology and for providing all the data that certifiers and verifiers need. The work is dynamic, as international legislation, local laws and certification frameworks are all still taking shape, and changes in any of them can reach our day-to-day work quickly and alter it considerably. The roleYou sit in the middle of the team's technical workstreams, and all of them will draw on you. Roughly half of your time goes into making our own code faster and more reliable, and the other half into making the rest of the team more effective. Infrastructure and tooling. We are moving to a new Databricks environment and a lot of the groundwork still has to be laid. You will set up and manage our monorepo, standardise how colleagues run a local development environment and connect it to Databricks from VSCode so that debugging no longer happens through print statements, bring down cluster start times that currently run to fifteen minutes, and take on runtime and package versioning across our repositories. The schema and table design in the new environment is still open, and you will help work that out. Pipelines and performance. Our remote sensing scientist designs and maintains the biomass model, and your work starts after that, making it run at portfolio scale. The same applies to the methodology work now under development, which has to be turned into production code and built into pipelines that can run several methodologies in parallel. A good part of this is finding time in code that already works: introducing Spark where it fits, vectorising, splitting work into jobs, and chaining processes without changing what comes out at the end. Engineering practice. You review pull requests and give feedback on code quality, you test pipelines and processes before they go into production, and you keep our documentation and wiki usable. Our output is audited by an external certifier, so we also need to be able to show a year from now what ran, on which data, and in which version. Setting up data lineage and versioning to support that is part of your job. Alongside this, our operations lead will come to you with processes that are still manual, and you will help work out which of them are worth automating and then build it. You will not be handed a fixed set of tasks. You will be given a problem and the room to solve it, with colleagues who are available when you need them. We use AI coding assistants a great deal and we have no reservations about that, provided you read what comes out with a critical eye and can explain why the code does what it does. We are looking for someone whocan work independently, while knowing when to ask for helpis organised and flexiblehas an eye for detail and arrives with pragmatic solutionsis not afraid to speak up, including when the problem sits in someone else's codewants to be part of a team of young professionals working to improve the lives of smallholder farmers What you bringAround four years of relevant experience as a developer or data engineerPython and experience handling large (geospatial) datasets are hard requirements, at a level where you have genuinely worked with itDemonstrable experience in parallelising and scaling compute-intensive processesGit and CI/CD are a standard part of how you work, and you are comfortable reviewing other people's codeExperience with Databricks or Spark is an advantage, but not a mustThe ability to explain what you are doing in plain language to colleagues without a technical background, in fluent EnglishKnowledge of or experience with Nature Based Solutions projects is nice but not required What we offerA gross monthly salary between €4500 and €5500 based on a 40-hour workweek;8% holiday allowance;An NS Business Card for commuting between home and work;Opportunities for personal and professional development through training courses and learning programs;A pension scheme with a.s.r. with a total pension contributions of 15% for the basic pension scheme (3,5% paid by the employee and 11,5% paid by Acorn);A warm and social office environment with great colleagues, where lunch often means gathering around the toaster to make and enjoy fresh toasted sandwiches together.A passionate and international team working towards a meaningful missing support and empower smallholder farmers globally to transition to more sustainable agricultural practices, improving people’s livelihood and climate adaptation. This is a full-time position. We work in the office in Utrecht 3 days per week. Your fast response to this vacancy is much appreciated as we need your help in the short term. How to applyApply via our website: https://www.acorn.earth/vacancymediordeveloper