Calling all energy data nerds–Catalyst is hiring!
We are hiring for a fully remote, mixed technical/non-technical role working on the clean energy transition. On the technical side you will be contributing to a Python data pipeline and working with various climate-oriented organizations on their data problems. On the non-technical side you’ll be cooperatively running a business with 8-9 other people.
While you must be authorized to work long-term in the US, you do not need to currently reside there.
Why work with us?
Who we are
Catalyst Cooperative is a workers’ cooperative with 8 member-owners. Our mission is to make energy data more accessible to the organizations and individuals shepherding the clean energy transition.
We have two primary work streams – one is the development and maintenance of the Public Utility Data Liberation project, an open-source database that cleans and connects a wide variety of publicly available US energy data so researchers, policy-makers, and others can avoid that toil. The other is working with organizations like the Rocky Mountain Institute and GridLab to support their data analysis and engineering needs.
How we work
We are an all-remote, non-hierarchical, democratically governed organization. All new Catalyst hires start with a 6-month contract period. Catalyst members will then vote on whether to offer membership in the cooperative to the new hire.
- Salary: We pay ourselves a base salary of $36.75/hour. As a contractor, you will be paid a slightly higher hourly rate ($39.56) so that the post-tax wages are the same.
- Profit sharing: every year we decide how much of the profit to split up amongst the members, and distribute it based on hours worked. Over 2021-2023 this averaged out to about $9k/person/year.
- Hours requirement: We expect everyone to work at least 1000 hours per year, which averages to ~20 hours per week. We make good use of this flexibility – as a co-op we average around 23h/week.
- Employee benefits: All members and contractors receive a $170/month healthcare stipend.
- Member benefits: Once you’ve been approved as a member, you’ll be eligible for profit-sharing, a $3,300/3 years tech stipend, and a contribution to your 401(k) equivalent to 15% of your wages. You’ll also accrue 3-5 days of PTO that based on your working hours. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but we are very flexible with unpaid time off and many of us take month-long vacations as well as smaller vacations throughout the year. See the Benefits section of our policy handbook for more details.
Everyone is involved in big decisions about co-op governance. Everyone does some technical work on the product side and some non-technical work on the business side. Everyone plays multiple roles in multiple teams. For example:
- Dazhong is on two technical teams – Inframundo, which is responsible for infrastructure, and Caracal, which picks up projects in all domains in a flexible way. He is also on two non-technical teams, internal management and community development.
- Katie is only on one technical team, Caracal. She is also on two non-technical teams: business development, grant development.
See our handbook for more information.
If you are interested in our technical stack, it’s outlined in the Tools section of our GitHub README.
What do we need from you?
Core Requirements
We need you to have ALL of these.
- A passion for climate action, open source software, and open data
- Desire to be in a hybrid technical/non-technical role
- Readiness to participate in the democratic management and governance of the cooperative. Prior experience doing so is completely optional – we know there aren’t a ton of software co-ops out there.
- Ability to jump into a messy Python ETL codebase and wrangle some messy data into less messy data.
- Experience shipping reliable software on a team, using tools like Git and GitHub to collaborate and automated testing pipelines to verify program behavior.
- Experience communicating effectively & proactively in a remote work context.
Extra Requirements
We ‘re looking for deep experience in 1-2 of these or broad experience in 3-4 of these. If you have a skillset that’s not listed here but seems relevant, absolutely pitch us on why it’s important!
Technical
- Data visualization: we’ve got all this great data, and sometimes a chart or dashboard is the best way to turn that into actual knowledge. Plus this will help with our social media game.
- Data analysis: we transform the data quite a bit in the process of cleaning it up. Having experience imputing missing data, validating inputs and outputs, and using statistical methods will all help us make sure those transformations are sensible.
- PDF scraping / extraction: pulling a data table out of a PDF scanned in 2008 and uploaded to some regulatory agency’s website is good. We’re in the business of doing that for all the files on that website – so if you can automate that process, so much the better.
- Record linkage: this helps us connect disparate datasets into a bigger picture of what’s going on with the US energy system.
Non-technical
- Energy domain knowledge: you don’t need to be an expert in energy policy or have intervened in a regulatory proceeding. But having done some reading about the electricity system and having an appetite for more would be helpful in talking to all of our external partners!
- Open-source contributor management: we are attempting to build up a thriving contributor community. It’s hard and we would appreciate some help!
- Open-source organizational stakeholder management: there are several organizations that care about PUDL and we’d like there to be more! It would be good to have a wise approach to guiding these relationships so we all get the most out of them.
- Business development: much of our impact comes from supporting organizations that are doing good work. If you’re excited to build relationships with them and figure out how to work together, that’s huge.
- Grant writing: generous grants from various organizations (e.g. NSF, Mozilla, the Sloan Foundation) are key to our ability to work flexibly on a variety of useful projects.
- Project management: because we cobble together our work across many projects, there’s always a lot of stuff going on. More people with experience managing parallel workstreams, juggling priorities, and making sure everyone is on the same page will always be helpful.
Logistics
You must have authorization to work in the US long-term. Although you need not be physically located in the US, we ask that you are available to work during our core hours of 1 PM – 5 PM US Eastern time.
Send us a resume and cover letter at hello@catalyst.coop and we’ll get back to you in 1-2 business days. If we don’t, feel free to nudge us and we’ll apologize profusely and respond ASAP.
For the cover letter, please tell us why you care about climate, open data, and cooperatives.
After that, the interview process looks like:
- 20 minute phone screen
- 2 hour take-home test
- 1 hour take-home followup
- 2x 1 hour behavioral interviews
Interview questions will be provided ahead of time.