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Data Engineer (Part-Time, with Path to Full-Time)
Hohonu
Data Science · Part-time
Posted on Apr 28, 2025
Data Engineer (Part-Time, with Path to Full-Time)
Location: Remote (U.S. preferred)
Type: Part-Time (20–25 hrs/week to start)
About Hohonu
Hohonu is a climate tech startup on a mission to protect coastal communities from flooding and sea level rise. We provide real-time, hindcasted, and forecasted water level data and analytics to local governments, state agencies, and national partners—turning risk into resilience.
Our full-stack platform combines rugged hardware, internet-connected telemetry, and intuitive dashboards to deliver actionable insights where they matter most. We’ve deployed over 150 sensors across 16 states and are scaling rapidly.
Our customers span the U.S., including City of Boston, City of Annapolis, and Lee County, FL, helping emergency managers, DOTs, and insurers make smarter decisions during floods and extreme weather.
We’re backed by mission-aligned investors including Builder’s Vision, Tailwind Climate, Elemental Impact, Cisco Foundation, and more - groups who share our commitment to achieving long-term and sustainable impact.
We’re not your typical VC-backed startup. We care deeply about growing sustainably, building a resilient business, and investing in long-term relationships with our team, our customers, and the communities we serve.
We are a remote-first, technical-first team that values kindness, trust, patience, and respect.
About The Role
We’re hiring a part-time Data Engineer to take technical ownership of our backend data systems—with a clear path to full-time if it’s a mutual fit. You’ll work closely with our full-time data scientist and product team to stabilize and scale our infrastructure, enabling better forecasting, alerting, and insights for our customers.
This is a foundational role with broad scope across data pipelines, APIs, system monitoring, and backend performance. We’re looking for someone who wants to grow with us and take ownership of our data platform over the long haul.
As our first dedicated Data Engineer, you’ll play a foundational role in shaping the future of our platform. You’ll:
- Architect and scale data pipelines that power everything from real-time flood alerts to machine learning-driven forecasts
- Optimize ingestion and access to high-volume, time-series data coming from sensors across the U.S.
- Partner closely with data scientists and engineers to deliver fast, accurate insights to our customers
- Help us scale from 150+ sensors to 1,000+ while improving data quality, stability, and system performance
If you're excited by mission-driven engineering, real-world impact, and ownership in an early-stage startup with traction, we’d love to meet you.
What You’ll Do
As our first dedicated data engineer, you’ll take technical ownership of our core data systems, ensuring they’re stable, performant, and ready to scale. You’ll be responsible for keeping our platform running reliably. If the system goes down, you’re the one leading the charge to bring it back up. This is a foundational, lead-level role with broad scope across infrastructure, data, and backend systems.
- Design and maintain robust ETL pipelines for sensor data, forecasting models, and alerts
- Optimize data ingestion and storage for high-volume time-series data
- Collaborate with our data scientist to productionalize models and analytics
- Build or extend APIs to serve clean, reliable data to our dashboards and partners
- Monitor and improve data quality, latency, and system performance
- Support backend development in Django, DRF, Celery, and help maintain infrastructure on Heroku and AWS
- Implement and advocate for software engineering best practices (CI/CD, testing, version control)
What We’re Looking For
Must-Haves:
- Strong experience in backend development and data engineering
- Fluency in Python and JavaScript (TypeScript a plus)
- Solid grasp of databases and API development
- Experience with cloud platforms (Heroku, AWS preferred)
- Familiarity with backend frameworks like Django
- Strong communication and collaboration skills
- Initiative and ownership—you can run with a project
Nice-to-Haves:
- Experience with React Native or mobile app development
- Frontend skills or eye for UI/UX (we have a strong frontend lead but welcome help)
- Background in cross-platform development
- Interest or experience in environmental tech or ocean data
What We Offer
- Competitive Compensation and Benefits: Salary aligned with experience and market benchmarks for early-stage climate tech roles
- Equity: Meaningful ownership in a high-impact, venture-backed startup
- Remote Flexibility: Work from anywhere in the U.S. with flexible hours; we collaborate async-first using Slack, Notion, and GitHub, with light touchpoints throughout the week and flexibility in work hours.
- Tech + Growth Opportunities: Deep exposure to end-to-end product development, IoT systems, data science, and climate infrastructure
- Time Off: Generous PTO and holiday policy to rest, recharge, and live your life
Hohonu is an equal opportunity employer.