Climate Mitigation Data Engineer: Building Climate Solutions for Cities
Have you built a solid career in data engineering and now want your work to actually matter?
Open Earth Foundation is a California-based nonprofit on a mission to create groundbreaking technology that helps combat the climate crisis.
Our climate platforms support cities around the world with data-driven climate planning and delivery.
We're a diverse, global team working remotely and collaborating with partners worldwide to make real change possible.
With strong funding and a powerhouse team of innovators, we're ready to tackle big challenges for a resilient Earth for generations to come and we need the planet's brightest minds to help solve them
Your mission, should you choose to accept it:
As a
Climate Mitigation Data Engineer
at Open Earth Foundation, you build the data cities use to plan, act on and track their climate goals. That starts with greenhouse-gas inventories cities can trust, and runs through estimating what each action could cut, to monitoring progress and reporting it.
Cities need to know where their emissions come from, report them to frameworks such as the GHG Protocol for Cities (GPC) and CDP, and track progress over time. You own that mitigation record: the methods, the inputs, and the models behind the numbers.
A Data Platform Engineer owns the shared warehouse and the pipeline platform. You decide whether a calculation is right, which dataset it should use, and where the gaps are. Together you put that domain on a platform other Digital Service applications can use. Colleagues on the data team cover climate risk and adaptation. This role is focused on mitigation.
This is a mid-level role. You ship datasets and reviewed methods with your manager.



You are not expected to design the warehouse architecture.
This position is
fully
remote
and
international
as our organization works across different time zones.
Schedule flexibility is expected with a willingness to collaborate in overlapping core hours for meetings from 8am PST to 11am PST (GMT-8).
Availability to work with overlapping hours across U.S., Latin American and European time zones is preferred.
Experience with asynchronous remote work and the ability to self-organize tasks is preferred.
The following requirements describe our idóneo candidate. If you don't meet some of the requirements, you're encouraged to apply anyway. Let us know if there is something missing and how we can work together to make it up.
Essential Functions and Specific Duties:
Design and maintain the data models for emissions inventories, activity data, emission factors, sources, and methodologies
Build and run pipelines that ingest national, global, and city-provided datasets into those models, with tests, versioning, and clear lineage
Review technical methodologies for emissions calculations: check the logic, data inputs, assumptions, and global-warming-potential choices, and flag gaps
Encode reporting rules so outputs align with the GPC and with other frameworks cities submit to, including CDP where relevant




Snapshot factors and methods onto results so a historical inventory stays reproducible when a catalogue changes later
Set data-quality checks and compare results against independent sources
Document data models, pipelines, and methods so partners and colleagues can follow how every number was produced
Work with the Systems Data Engineer so domain models land in the shared warehouse as contracts, not as a private schema
Support cities and partners with emissions profiles and with questions about where a number came from
Use AI tools for dataset discovery, cleaning, documentation, and method review, and check the output before it is used
Other:
Actively participate in team building and culture development activities at Open Earth Foundation
Qualifications:
5+ years in data engineering or a closely related role
Strong Python and SQL
Working knowledge of greenhouse-gas accounting frameworks, such as the GHG Protocol for Cities (GPC) or IPCC methods
Solid understanding of relational databases and schema design (for example PostgreSQL)
Experience with at least one pipeline or orchestration tool (for example dbt, Airflow, Dagster, Mage, or similar)
Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and data warehouses (for example BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or PostgreSQL used as an analytical store)
Nice to have
Hands-on experience building or reviewing city or national emissions inventories
Emission-factor catalogues, notation keys (IE, NE, NO, C), and data-quality tiers
Familiarity with GPC sectors, scopes, and BASIC / BASIC+ reporting levels
CDP, Common Reporting Format, or eCRF reporting
Geospatial data and tools (PostGIS, GeoPandas) for allocating activity data to cities
Hands-on use o

📌 Climate Mitigation Data Engineer: Building Climate Solutions For Cities (Barcelona)
🏢 Open Earth Foundation
📍 Barcelona