Disclaimer: Hunt UK Visa Sponsors aggregates job listings from publicly available sources, such as search engines, to assist with your job hunting. We do not claim affiliation with Rainforest Builder. For the most up-to-date job details, please visit the official website by clicking "Apply Now."
Job Title: Lead Engineer
Contract Type: Full-time
Work Arrangement: Hybrid/Remote
Location: London/UK/Europe
To apply
Email a CV and covering letter to [email protected]. 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 of the team 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
