Senior Python Engineer (On-site or Remote)

About HowGood

HowGood is an independent research company with the world's largest database on product sustainability. With more than 33,000 ingredients, chemicals, and materials assessed, HowGood SaaS and impact data offerings help leading brands, retailers and investors improve their environmental and social impact. Through in-depth, ingredient-level insights into factors ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to animal welfare to labor risk, HowGood data powers strategic decision-making for the sourcing, manufacturing, merchandising, and marketing of sustainable products.

HowGood was founded with the belief that good information enables good decisions. By illuminating the complex systems that affect our environment, we push organizations to make sustainable products. HowGood is committed to catalyzing change in the food industry, to help create a resilient ecosystem for us and future generations.

The Engineering Team

The engineering team is at the center of operations at HowGood. We build the applications used by our Fortune 500 customers to make critical decisions, and the tools our Research Team uses to work with large pools of data. The work we do enables customers to see the entire universe of sourcing choices and understand their impact within a greater system.

Our team is currently building and evolving our core features in three key directions. We are expanding the capacity and subject matter of our data ingestion to show change over time in carbon emissions, biodiversity impact, working conditions, and other metrics. We are also enhancing our reporting on sustainability performance, for things like evaluating regulatory compliance globally. Finally, we are building the platform used by suppliers to integrate their inventories into our platform.

Sustainability experience is not required to be successful here – we look for smart, ideologically motivated, empathetic engineers who love solving problems and are determined to make an impact in line with our mission. While working on a team of like minded engineers, you will have complete ownership of the solutions and architectural designs that keep HowGood nimble.

The applications and infrastructure that we build requires the ability to seamlessly handle huge amounts of data quickly and reliably, to put our customers on a regenerative path. Our impact on the world depends on it.

Responsibilities

• Work with the Research and Product teams to implement and design new features, such as metric calculations or better ways of storing/presenting data
• Own the architecture, implementation, and delivery of features from concept to deployment
• Test and document your work, along with the standards and conventions agreed upon by the team
• Help the team grow and improve team culture by putting forward your ideas

Requirements

• Ability to communicate their opinions to the team, as well as with senior management
• 5+ years experience with Python
• 3+ years experience with Django
• Passionate about code readability, docs, and testing as priority, ahead of optimization
• Experience building REST APIs
• Experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database
• Familiarity with Git and Docker

Our Stack

• Python/Django
• Docker
• PostgreSQL
• Elasticsearch
• Redis
• Kafka
• AWS

Why work at HowGood?

• Salary range $130,000-$185,000 (salary commensurate with experience)
• Health insurance + Vision & Dental
• 401k with company match
• Unlimited PTO (that we actually want you to use!)
• Paid parental leave
• Work remotely, or from our upstate NY office, or hybrid401k with company match

HowGood has the world’s largest sustainability database and has recently completed the build for a new data model that allows for unprecedented flexibility in building metrics that help decision makers the world over understand the impact of their choices. Whether we are supporting NGO’s, business leads, product developers or individual shoppers, we help people understand the impact of their choices. Our model allows us to build metrics for measuring the impact of externalized costs faster and better than ever before.

Applicants for this role should be excited to participate in creating new understandings, supporting better decision making and helping to change the world.

Competitive benefits package available, with salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.

🚨 Special Application Instructions 🚨

In addition to applying through Lever, submit your application programmatically by sending a signed POST request to our API. Visit the instructions page for the endpoint, payload schema, signing key, and a working Python example:

https://howgood-apply-api.howgood.workers.dev/how-to/

This is part of the evaluation. It demonstrates that you can read documentation and write working integration code.

HowGood is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We aim to employ people who reflect the diverse nature of society and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. We seek to empower each individual and support the diverse cultures, perspectives, skills and experiences within our workforce. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.