Lead Software Engineer, Data Sovereignty

About Conservation Metrics

Conservation Metrics, Inc. (CMI) is a mission-driven social enterprise dedicated to providing technology-driven monitoring services that improve outcomes in the environmental and social justice spheres. We help partners ranging from non-profits to local governments and Indigenous community organizations across the globe design ecological or biocultural studies, incorporate remote sensing and field surveying tools, report on real-world outcomes, and iterate on methods to achieve their conservation and stewardship goals.

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer, Data Sovereignty to own the architecture and data infrastructure behind our Guardian Connector platform. Your expertise and commitment will support grassroots community efforts with a purpose and make a meaningful impact in our world.

About The Guardian Connector Project

Indigenous Peoples around the world are working to protect and govern their territories under increasing pressure from extractive industries, illegal activity, and climate change. Conservation Metrics, in partnership with Indigenous organizations and allied institutions such as Nia Tero, Awana Digital, and Imazon, supports this work through our Indigenous Guardianship Program, which centers on the Guardian Connector platform.

Guardian Connector is an interoperable, open-source data platform designed to support territorial monitoring and Indigenous data sovereignty. It combines remote sensing products (maps, alerts, and change detection), mobile data collection tools, secure data warehousing, and governed data access to allow communities to explore, analyze, and summarize their information.

The platform is architected to support data sovereignty: the ability for Indigenous partners to determine how their data is structured, accessed, shared, and interpreted. The technology adapts to local cultural, linguistic, and political contexts. Most communities rely on CMI to host their single-tenant stacks, but self-hosting is possible. Our goal is to move away from extractive monitoring projects and toward a durable data platform that enables Indigenous communities to define the metrics used to represent their territories and well-being.

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer, Data Sovereignty

As Lead Software Engineer, Data Sovereignty, you are the technical conscience of the Guardian Connector platform. You will own its architecture and data infrastructure. You will work across engineering and partner-facing teams to build systems that support Indigenous data sovereignty, secure collaboration, and long-term stewardship of community data.

This is a Lead role. We are looking for someone who can sit with hard architectural trade-offs, work through them with the team and our partners, and commit. Our partners operate in environments where connectivity is intermittent and technical capacity is limited. The realities of building software for these users require choosing the best path forward despite the trade-offs rather than holding out for a perfect option that doesn’t exist. Our team is strong on rigor, exploration, and care; we want a Lead who complements that with the discipline to close decisions, ship, and work with our Partner Support team so they can enable others to use the software.

We expect Leads at CMI to write production code and stay close enough to the system to have grounded opinions about it. As a Lead you will also set technical norms for the team and actively develop the engineers around you through pairing, mentorship, and code review.

What We’re Looking For

• You have configured PostgreSQL roles, grants, and RLS for production applications.
• You’ve operated services in self-hosted or single-VM software stacks. For the most part this is not cloud-native work.
• Your familiarity with Docker is at a level where you understand volumes and port mappings (the Guardian Connector stack uses CapRover, which runs apps on Docker Swarm).
• You’ve worked with identity systems (Auth0, Keycloak, or similar).
• You write design docs as a mode of working through architectural questions.
• Empathy for non-technical users. You craft solutions for smart, fast learners who have limited experience with computers or smartphones. A listen-based, human-centered design process is at the heart of our work.
• You can make and defend architectural calls under hard trade-offs, and you can do so collaboratively, bringing partners and teammates into the decision.
• While LLMs are part of our toolkit (governed by human-first contributing guidelines), your work must be grounded in your own deep understanding of systems and sound technical judgement.

No specific formal educational credential is required. Relevant work history that demonstrates your growth and interest as a technologist is highly valued.

What You’ll Do In The First Year

• Improve the stack-deploy developer experience: Today, spinning up a new instance involves long playbooks and scripts: provisioning Auth0 tenants and app keys, installing apps on CapRover, and wiring environment variables across services (this is mostly not a problem Terraform can solve). You will own and dramatically simplify the installation and first-time configuration of the Guardian Connector software stack. Improvements here benefit both external users who run their own instances and our internal team, which hosts the stack on behalf of partners.
• Design and implement governed data access systems: Guardian Connector runs on a single VM with an on-box SQL database and media storage. Partners want interfaces that enable controlled data sharing across internal and external consumers, including with third-party BI, GIS, and AI tools. You’ll help to design role-based access controls (RBAC), implement scoped or time-bound data credentials, and define clear boundaries between private, shared, and public data. Supporting this pillar is the metadata and data catalog work needed to make data discoverable and understandable to the people granting and using that access.
• Develop AI and LLM capabilities that preserve data sovereignty: Rather than baking specific AI features into Guardian Connector — which would make our team a bottleneck on every new model and tool — we believe the more flexible path is to let partners bring the AI tool of their choice to their own data, with those tools acting as consumers of the governed access layer above. You’ll prototype and evaluate approaches such as local or self-hosted models, retrieval pipelines, and natural language interfaces that allow users to query and explore their data without external data leakage, and recommend one or two third-party tools we can endorse for partners.

Your work in your first year will help move Guardian Connector from active R&D into a phase focused on scaling adoption to more Indigenous partners.

Beyond 2026: With most of Guardian Connector’s hard architectural problems solved, this role has room to expand into CMI’s bioacoustic monitoring product for wildlife conservation: a multi-tenant big-data software service.

We value engineers who are solution-oriented, comfortable collaborating across disciplines, and motivated by the broader purpose of the work. The tools you help build will be used by Indigenous communities with diverse technical backgrounds, so curiosity, clarity, reliability, and thoughtful design are essential.

Remote Work & Schedule

This position reports to the Director of Engineering and works closely with both software engineering and partner support teams. The role is remote, so comfort with asynchronous collaboration, clear written communication, and coordination across time zones is important.

This role frequently interacts with people in all US time zones, and in Brazil and Nigeria. Your work hours are flexible, but we will want to establish at least three recurring 3-hour time slots every week when you and the team are all available at the same time (Monday through Thursday, between 15:00-23:00 UTC / 10:00-17:00 Eastern).

Key skills/competency

• Lead Software Engineer
• Data Sovereignty
• Guardian Connector
• PostgreSQL
• Docker
• Identity Systems
• RBAC
• AI/LLM
• System Architecture
• Human-Centered Design