How to find climate software jobs in software development

What is climate tech?

Climate tech touches different aspects of everyday life, and therefore offers various solutions to many problems -- and that presents numerous career opportunities.

"There's a lot of technical innovation going on," said Magda Cheang, founder and CEO at Jobs for Planet, a London-based recruiting agency focused on climate tech and sustainability.

Climate tech developers focus on delivering technologies that contribute to the decarbonization of the planet. This includes technologies and practices that accomplish or contribute to the following benefits:

• Remove carbon from the atmosphere.
• Decrease greenhouse gas emissions.
• Help communities and companies adapt to climate change.

Software careers in climate tech

To get a career foothold as a software programmer in climate tech, think about how technologies and systems support some aspect of the decarbonization goal.

Climate change adaptation is one example. Imagine a farming operation that grows two varieties of soybeans: one that is heat resistant, and one that's resistant to floods.

Alex Clark is chief technology officer at ClimateAi, a climate resilience tech platform developer headquartered in San Francisco. The company's platform uses AI and machine learning to predict and monitor weather conditions, and customers in agricultural, food and beverage industries apply that data to make operational and supply chain-related decisions that improve their yields. This doesn't directly solve climate change, but it does help organizations better manage how they work through it, Clark explained.

Alex Clark

"If you have a better idea of what's going to happen [during the growing season] in terms of heat or flooding, you'll know which one to plant so that you can get better yields and provide more food, [and] you can make more revenue for your business to continue to operate," he said.

There are also software development careers in carbon tech, building technology that helps remove carbon from the atmosphere and systems that help organizations measure and manage their carbon emissions. For example, organizations can use carbon accounting software to track and calculate their carbon emissions (including throughout their supply chains), set emissions targets and generate reports based on that data.

On the clean energy side, there is strong interest in software to support the operation of solar and wind power generation and analyze how to improve those systems' efficiency.

There is also an opportunity to reduce the carbon footprint of climate tech itself. Understanding climate patterns relies on big-data analysis, which heavily relies upon powerful servers inside data centers that themselves consume energy and produce greenhouse gas emissions.

"There is a whole field [focused on] optimizing algorithms and computational systems to run more efficiently," Clark said. No longer is the goal to run as fast as possible and optimize for memory. "Now we want to operate clean tech to solve for climate," he said.

Required skills to work in climate tech software

The most valuable software developers in climate tech are well-versed in both software engineering and desired business outcomes. They have skills for individual tasks at hand and understand holistically how their work contributes to achieving their organizations' goals. (Developers with this ability are valuable in any sector, of course.)

Programming languages are important [in climate tech], but they've become the bare minimum. What makes a software developer invaluable is their understanding of the problem they're working on, and how that translates into the code that they're producing.

"Programming languages are important, but they've become the bare minimum," Clark said. "What makes a software developer invaluable is their understanding of the problem they're working on, and how that translates into the code that they're producing."

Other keys for successful developers in climate tech include the following:

Understand big data systems. Climate tech involves large volumes of data and interdependencies of trends, and that involves a huge amount of processing and analysis.

"There are fairly complicated models that produce a lot of data to figure out how this very complex ecosystem is impacted by change, what change will be or the consequences it will have in a practical sense down the road," Clark said.

This also means engineering talent must use data even when major pieces of it are either incomplete or missing entirely. "Getting data availability is still a huge problem in this space," Clark added.

Know how to use machine learning. Understanding how machine learning can make a software developer more efficient is a big plus, Clark said. There are many examples of ML uses for climate tech, from optimizing HVAC systems to predicting and mitigating wildfires to development of alternative fuels.

Be familiar with the industry's technical terms and jargon. Get up to speed with phrasings and acronyms associated with climate tech, as well as environmental, social and governance (ESG). Developers in this position have many options for fundamental research here, such as the following:

• Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
• Myclimate.
• Project Drawdown.
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Risks associated with working in climate tech

Those who want to pursue a career in this space should also acknowledge some risks.

Compared to other industries, climate tech is relatively new and currently is home to a lot of experimentation. That's great for innovation, but it also means churn. Companies, workers and early stage technologies and products might or might not pan out. Climate tech systems currently receive considerable buy-in -- from government agencies, large enterprises, investors and the public -- but that's not always true of smaller organizations with fewer budgetary resources.

"You can be a software engineer [who finds] the coolest startup that's doing something amazing, but they can't get the adoption and the buy-in from the customer side to sustain the business," Clark said.

There are also regulatory and political factors to consider. A new government administration could change existing policies and result in less investment in green technology, which poses a risk for companies in the sector, especially startups. Alternatively, a promising technology might be found to have unintended negative consequences on biodiversity.

Magda Cheang

"We do have a planet crisis, and there are so many different ways to try and address it [through] nature-based or technology-based solutions," Cheang said. "But it is still fairly new."

The rewards of working in climate tech

The prevalence of big data and machine learning in climate tech and clean tech opens the door for developers with a strong grasp of these disciplines. Compute and storage have become less expensive, while the tendency to collect copious amounts of information has increased. A developer who excels within those parameters is an asset.

"If you can get an understanding of how to deal with those kinds of systems and find the signal in the noise, so to speak, then you can add a tremendous amount of value coming into this space in particular," Clark said.

For developers who are concerned about the planet, the benefits of working in climate tech are obvious. What's not to like about building software that solves tough challenges and truly makes the world a better place? Then there is also the thrill of attacking a complex issue.

"You've got a lot of different variables to deal with; you've got technologies that are cutting-edge; and you've got this problem that is sufficiently difficult and interesting to challenge every level of your skill set," Clark said. "When you put all that together, it seems like a dream scenario for a software developer."

Carolyn Heinze is a Paris-based freelance writer. She covers several technology and business areas, including HR software and sustainability.