Staff Software Engineer (Classification Pipelines)

About Scope3

Scope3 is the industry’s leading collaborative sustainability platform. By modeling the complex digital advertising supply chain, we help brands measure and dramatically reduce digital waste to reduce carbon emissions from advertising and increase the efficacy of advertising investment. This is an exceptional opportunity to build a company alongside great people and make a difference in one of the most important issues facing the planet: the climate crisis.

We’re a reliably-funded company of 100+ folks distributed across the globe. We are fortunate to be led by an experienced leadership team, many of whom designed and engineered the digital advertising landscape as we know it today. The company secured $20M in Series B funding led by GV in Oct 2023 (additional investors include Venrock, Rucker Park, Room40 Ventures, and Craft Ventures), and we are thrilled to be the recipient of a secondary round of $25M in Oct 2024. Scope3 has significant market traction with more than 70+ customers and is experiencing accelerated growth.

Scope3 is a fully remote company and largely asynchronous to provide flexible working hours and to operate globally, with concentrations in New York and Europe. At this time, we are hiring in Canada, Australia, UK, France, Germany, Singapore and the United States.

About The Role

We are excited to add a staff engineer to our content Classification Pipeline team. This individual contributor role will be responsible for shaping the technical vision and implementation of our content crawling and classification pipelines as we scale our agentic AI platform. Although an individual contributor, the role will require mentorship and collaboration with other engineers on the team. We recommend being based in the US or Canada working from the Eastern time zone, or in the UK, France, or Germany.

We believe that advertising can made significantly more efficient while also being more cost effective. Our LLM powered classification system allows advertisers to use plain language to describe the kind of content they want to prioritize or avoid advertising with; this is a marked improvement over keyword or domain-based allow and block lists, allowing for nuance and rapid adaptation. This role is an opportunity to figure out how to adopt and use the latest large language models and technologies to efficiently obtain and evaluate text, image and video content from across the web; this will enable our customers to maximize the reach of their media spend while simultaneously reducing the associated climate impact.

Tech Stack + Architecture

Our classification pipeline consists of:

• A high-performance system to download web and other media content and understand key aspects of its structure (e.g., where is content versus containers, what does the advertising structure look like) and persist the content and analysis to be accessible to other Scope3 systems.
• Multiple classification systems powered by both traditional ML and generative AI models that can analyze multi-modal content to determine its suitability for use by different advertising buyers.

These systems are implemented in Go and Python, and are deployed to our Kubernetes clusters, hosted on Google’s Cloud Platform. We use a variety of tools for persistence including Google Cloud Storage for bulk data, SQL databases and Google BigQuery for transactional and analytical data processing, and NoSQL stores for high-performance point reads. Our front-end systems are implemented using TypeScript and React/NextJS.

As we continue to scale, this role would be instrumental in tuning the current infrastructure and architecture, and designing it for the future.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to a team of engineers working on our content classification systems. This includes leading by example, as well as reviewing and shaping architecture and implementation.
• Collaborate with our customer facing experts, as well as our data science and design teams to assess the feasibility of new features and designs.
• Investigate and analyze performance to improve our systems in a data-driven and systematic manner.
• Identify and account for edge cases to ensure accuracy and reliability
• Peer with other technical leaders and the CTO as appropriate to improve Scope3's overall technical capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building distributed systems at scale. You should be comfortable designing and operating concurrent systems that have to interact with the challenges of the Internet and cloud systems.
• 4+ years experience operating as a technical lead, providing direction and mentorship to engineers on your team, plus building consensus towards best practices with peers and more senior engineers.
• History of fostering an inclusive and psychologically safe team environment. Our values are to “Learn Together” and “Lead with Curiosity" where we actively engage across team members, valuing different perspectives, and supporting collaborative problem-solving.
• A bias for being proactive to deliver results and impact, balancing speed with best practices and quality.
• Experience with any of the following: working in a containerized, cloud-hosted microservices environment, building ML and LLM-powered applications, ad-tech buy and sell side platforms.

Our Culture & Values

• Passion for the environment and climate work. We are a mission-driven company, and this is what motivates us to work hard and deliver outcomes for our customers. 
• Clear and empathetic communication, especially while working asynchronously. We have always been a global, remote-first company and we collaborate using Notion, Figma, Slack, Loom, and other tools. 
• We celebrate healthy conflict in the workplace; we focus on the solutions and we move on quickly. 
• The ability and accountability to deliver what we promise. We do what we say we will do, and we don’t make promises we can’t keep. 
• Experience driving systemic change. Our mission is to decarbonize advertising and this requires a holistic approach to re-imagining and inspiring an industry movement at a global scale. 

A Note To Applicants

We believe that all people are capable of great things. We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the requirements that are listed within this job description.

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