Job Title: Lead Engineer
Contract Type: Full-time
Work Arrangement: Hybrid/Remote
Location: UK/Europe
To apply
Email a CV and covering letter to. Applications are not accepted via LinkedIn. Short-listed candidates will be contacted.
About Rainforest Builder
Rainforest Builder is Africa's leading forest restoration company, on a mission to restore one million hectares of degraded land to natural tropical forest. We combine best-in-class science, forestry, and tech, to deliver forest restoration at unprecedented scale, sequestering hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2, saving highly-threatened biodiversity, and delivering equitable economic growth to local communities. We currently operate four projects across three countries in West Africa, and are in operational build-phase, and continuing to expand to new areas within the region.
About the role
We're looking for an experienced Lead Engineer to become a key member of our growing software team. You'll be hands-on, leading by doing: writing high-quality code, setting technical direction, making architectural decisions, and shaping our engineering practices. Initially, you will lead a small, cross-functional team- currently one Product Manager and two developers- and will lead the expansion of this team through further hiring and development. The focus is to build best-in-class software that allows operations to work more effectively, and ensure that we have high-fidelity data streams that document and demonstrate the work that we do. We are looking for someone who is motivated by real-world impact, developing software that contributes to the equitable development of local economies, biodiversity recovery, and greenhouse gas removal through forest restoration.
What you'll do
* Collaborate with our PM and users to design and build software used by field teams, ops leads, and HQ- focusing on high-integrity data capture, supporting daily workflows, and improving visibility across operations.
* Work across the stack, from frontend interfaces to backend services, data pipelines, and infrastructure.
* Own technical decisions, from architecture to tooling, choosing approaches that balance speed, scale, and sustainability.
* Establish good engineering practices, helping us ship fast, learn quickly, and build for the long term.
* Mentor and support other developers, helping them grow and work effectively
Essential qualifications
* 10+ years of hands-on experience building and scaling full-stack applications, confidently owning everything from frontend UI to backend logic to deployment infrastructure.
* Ability to write high-quality, maintainable code in Python and React, following modern best practices for structure, testing (using TDD), and readability.
* Deep experience designing, deploying and operating production systems in cloud environments (e.g. AWS, Azure), including designing robust CI/CD pipelines, automating testing and deployment.
* Experienced in designing scalable, modular system architectures and making clear trade-offs between performance, simplicity, and long-term maintainability.
* Regularly use AI-assisted development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Codeium, etc.) to accelerate development and improve productivity.
* Experience recruiting, managing, and coaching teams of software developers.
* Skilled at communicating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders and translating product goals into clear technical direction.
* Thrive in ambiguous, fast-changing environments, and enjoy solving hard problems simply.
* Have a strong product mindset- you care about outcomes, not just code- and have a good understanding of Agile principles.
Desirable qualifications
* Familiarity with mobile-first or offline-first applications.
* Experience in early-stage startups or small, cross-functional teams.
* Knowledge of mapping tools, geospatial data, or data visualisation.
Why join us?
* Be part of a mission-driven startup tackling one of the planet's most urgent challenges.
* Help shape the foundations of our tech and product stack.
* Join a supportive, purpose-led team, focussed on solving hard problems to unlock restoration at scale