Data Scientist in a Climate Tech Startup

Role: (Senior) Data Scientist in the Solutions Engineering Team

Location: Berlin, Germany or remote

Humankind has less than 6 years left to limit average global surface temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. This job offer constitutes an unique opportunity to prevent orders of magnitude of carbon emission, much more than you can achieve as an individual consumer or in most other forms of employment.

Alcemy was founded to reduce the massive CO2 footprint of the cement and concrete industry. Concrete is humanity's second most used material by volume and is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions.

We can change this! We leverage machine learning to provide smart production control software to the cement and concrete supply chain to improve efficiency and allow for the production of low-carbon cement and concrete at large scale. Our software is used 24/7 in cement and concrete plants to optimize production and reduce carbon emissions today. We are currently enabling our customers to save more than 100.000 tons of CO2 emissions a year and we aim to save 100 million tons per year in 2030.

THE OPPORTUNITY

• You will be part of the Customer Success & Solutions Engineering team, which is responsible for onboarding new and taking care of existing customers of both our cement and concrete products.
• You will play a big part in making sure customers can use our product successfully from a technical perspective, thereby directly contributing to our growth as a company, as well as customer happiness.
• You will help us improve our internal processes and develop new data tools that enable us to complete our tasks (e.g., routine data analyses) more efficiently, thereby ensuring we can easily scale our efforts to more customers.
• You will mentor more junior engineers on the team and support them where needed (e.g., review merge requests).
• The solutions engineering team collaborates closely with the customer success, cement, and concrete product teams. This means you will gain a broad overview over everything that happens at the company and help coordinate our development efforts to make sure the data tools we develop fit well into our ecosystem and provide value for members of other teams as well.
• We’re a start-up, so you’ll also have the opportunity to explore and work in other areas. For example, one of our front-end engineers recently took the responsibility for moving our web app deployment over to kubernetes.
• You will NOT be working with fancy deep learning methods (or most likely any ML models), since we have a dedicated machine learning team for this. We "only" make sure our customers' data is ready to be used by the models and configure them accordingly.

At alcemy, we use Amazon Web Services (AWS), which enables us to roll out our product at a fast pace. Our infrastructure is managed in terraform and everything runs on Kubernetes. The backend and machine learning tasks use Python, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL, as well as Python's numeric and data science ecosystem (jupyter, numpy, pandas, scikit-learn, streamlit, plotly, etc.). The frontend uses NextJS and Typescript. Furthermore, we emphasize proper software engineering practice, like CI/CD, merge reviews, and testing to ensure a working production environment.

Requirements

YOUR PROFILE

• You care about climate change.
• You are an experienced data scientist:
  • You have an inquisitive thinking style that helps you investigate complex data to find not only answers to open questions but also the relevant questions themselves.
  • You know your way around Python (incl. its data science stack) and SQL (PostgreSQL).
  • You have a good understanding of machine learning (ideally using time series data).
  • You test your code, can use the command line, and have experience with git and modern CI/CD pipelines.
  • You enjoy creating insightful data visualizations that communicate a clear message.
• You don’t like to sit in an ivory tower, but want to make sure your projects are brought to a successful end and have a real impact:
  • You have some experience managing projects and dealing with internal and external stakeholders. Staying on top of several projects at the same time comes natural to you.
  • You can communicate clearly (verbally and written) and are patient with non-techies.
  • You are a team player and enjoy helping your team members excel.
  • You are detail-oriented, organized, and diligent.
  • You are okay with some meetings in your calendar (and the context switches these bring with them) as you enjoy the exchange with other teams and customers.

Even better:

• You speak German or another European language besides English (to the point where you feel comfortable communicating directly with customers and other people external to our organization).
• You have used Grafana before to build dashboards.
• You have experience with AWS (esp. S3, SQS, SNS, Cloudwatch), terraform, and kubernetes.

WITHIN 1 MONTH YOU WILL

• Complete our onboarding and get guided through our development and CI/CD process.
• Clone your personal copy of our entire production tech stack, including front-end, back-end, and the machine learning pipeline. You can poke and dismantle it to your own liking.
• Learn a lot about cement production and the intricacies of concrete data.
• Deploy your first code to production.

WITHIN 3 MONTHS YOU WILL

• Implement the data ingest and configure the machine learning pipeline to onboard your first customer.
• Work together with customer success managers to identify their biggest pain points when checking customer data.
• Design and implement your first data tool to simplify and automate routine tasks.

WITHIN 6 MONTHS YOU WILL

• Be an integral part of our customer success & solutions engineering team:
  • Be responsible for estimating the time and technical scope of new features as well as their implementation.
  • Present and communicate data-driven insights to our customers.
  • Shape our tech stack and how we work together as a team.

Benefits

• You can live and work remotely anywhere within Germany (we meet up every few months for team weeks in Berlin to work together in-person).
• A competitive salary and VSOP equity options vested equally over 4 years.
• 1500€/year & 3 days/quarter as personal development budget.
• Mac or Linux laptop of your choice.
• 25 days of vacation plus additional company holidays between Christmas and New Years.
  • An additional day of vacation for every 2 years at alcemy.

• We value transparency and direct feedback and are always open to refactoring how we work together.
• Engineers take ownership of their features from implementation, testing through code reviews, and deployment.
• No engineer is on-call.
• We use modern communication tools like Google Workspace and Slack.
• We’ve been working hard to get a defined career progression framework in place, charting out both technical expert & management tracks.
• We are passionate about helping our customers and always approach them as well as each other in a supportive and appreciative way.
• Our team setup is hybrid, which means we have a gorgeous office at heart of Berlin, but you can also work remotely. To ensure human connection we have quarterly on-site team weeks. During those, we try to focus less on day2day work and more on workshops, evening activities, goal setting, and strategy definition.

Our hiring process is fully remote and we’ll communicate with you over email and video chat.

• A 1:1 screening call with one of our engineers
• Complete a take-home task
• A technical interview (90 minutes) with 2 of our engineers
• A team fit interview (45 minutes) with 2 of your future team members

We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply. We also acknowledge how stressful interviews can be. Let us know if there is anything we can do to improve the process so you can demonstrate your skill set.

Note: We currently do not offer visa sponsorships, so you have to have a valid work visa for the EU.

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