Application Guide
How to Apply for Staff Data Engineer
at Overstory
🏢 About Overstory
Overstory uses AI and high-resolution satellite imagery to help electric utilities identify and prioritize vegetation risks before they cause wildfires or outages. As a mission-driven climate tech company, they sit at the intersection of geospatial data, machine learning, and grid resilience—making them a rare opportunity for engineers who want their code to directly reduce catastrophic wildfire risk. Their remote-first, globally distributed team of outdoor enthusiasts and technologists is united by a shared commitment to combating climate change.
About This Role
As a Staff Data Engineer at Overstory, you'll architect and scale the data pipelines that ingest, process, and serve massive volumes of satellite imagery and geospatial data to power risk analytics for utility customers. You'll own the reliability, performance, and cost-efficiency of data infrastructure that directly informs where utilities should trim trees and harden grids—preventing wildfires and outages. This is a high-impact, hands-on technical leadership role where your data architecture decisions will shape how quickly and accurately Overstory can deliver life-saving insights.
💡 A Day in the Life
Your day might start with a stand-up with the data platform team, followed by deep work designing a new pipeline to ingest and process a fresh batch of satellite imagery from a new provider. You'll collaborate with ML engineers to ensure feature pipelines are optimized for model training, then review a pull request from a junior engineer and provide feedback. In the afternoon, you might analyze cloud costs and propose a more efficient storage strategy, or pair with a product manager to define data SLAs for a new utility customer.
🚀 Application Tools
🎯 Who Overstory Is Looking For
- 8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines, with deep expertise in batch and streaming frameworks (e.g., Spark, Flink, Kafka, Airflow) and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP).
- Strong background in geospatial or imagery data processing—familiarity with formats like GeoTIFF, COG, or libraries like GDAL, rasterio, or PostGIS is a major plus.
- Proven track record of designing data architectures that balance performance, cost, and reliability, ideally in a startup or high-growth environment where you've scaled systems from terabytes to petabytes.
- Experience mentoring data engineers and driving technical strategy across teams, with a bias for action and a passion for climate impact.
📝 Tips for Applying to Overstory
Highlight any experience with geospatial or satellite imagery data—mention specific tools (GDAL, rasterio, PostGIS) and the scale (TB/PB) you've handled, as this is core to Overstory's product.
Quantify the impact of your data pipelines: e.g., 'reduced processing time by 60%' or 'cut cloud costs by 40% while scaling to 10PB'—Overstory values engineers who optimize for both performance and cost.
Show familiarity with utility or climate-tech domains: even side projects or coursework in energy, vegetation management, or remote sensing will set you apart.
Emphasize your experience working remotely and asynchronously across time zones—Overstory's team spans the Americas and Europe, so demonstrate how you've thrived in distributed teams.
In your outreach or cover letter, explicitly connect your data engineering work to Overstory's mission: preventing wildfires and improving grid reliability. They want mission-driven engineers, not just technologists.
✉️ What to Emphasize in Your Cover Letter
Your cover letter should lead with a specific example of a large-scale data pipeline you architected and the measurable impact it had (e.g., latency reduction, cost savings, new capabilities). Then, explicitly tie your geospatial or imagery data experience to Overstory's use case—how you've processed satellite or raster data, or how you'd approach ingesting and serving high-resolution imagery at scale. Next, demonstrate your technical leadership: how you've mentored engineers, influenced architecture decisions, or driven cross-team initiatives. Finally, close with a genuine, personal reason why Overstory's mission resonates with you—whether it's a connection to wildfire prevention, climate action, or grid resilience.
Generate Cover Letter →🔍 Research Before Applying
To stand out, make sure you've researched:
- → Explore Overstory's product and case studies on their website—understand how they turn satellite imagery into vegetation risk scores for utilities and what data volumes they handle.
- → Research the electric utility industry's vegetation management challenges: read about major wildfires caused by power lines (e.g., PG&E) and how utilities currently manage vegetation risk.
- → Look into the technical stack Overstory likely uses: search for their engineering blog or talks to learn about their data infrastructure, ML models, and geospatial tooling.
- → Investigate competitors and partners in the geospatial analytics space (e.g., Descartes Labs, Orbital Insight) to understand Overstory's unique positioning in climate tech.
💬 Prepare for These Interview Topics
Based on this role, you may be asked about:
⚠️ Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Focusing only on generic data engineering skills without connecting them to Overstory's specific domain—geospatial imagery and utility risk analytics. They want someone who understands the unique challenges of satellite data.
- Underestimating the importance of cost optimization: Overstory processes massive imagery datasets, so ignoring cloud cost management in your examples could signal a lack of scalability mindset.
- Neglecting to show mission alignment: Overstory is a climate tech company; candidates who treat it as just another data engineering job may be screened out. Demonstrate genuine passion for their cause.
📅 Application Timeline
This position is open until filled. However, we recommend applying as soon as possible as roles at mission-driven organizations tend to fill quickly.
Typical hiring timeline:
Application Review
1-2 weeks
Initial Screening
Phone call or written assessment
Interviews
1-2 rounds, usually virtual
Offer
Congratulations!