Overview
Full Stack Engineer Jobs in South Africa at Contemplate Wild
Title: Full Stack Engineer
Company: Contemplate Wild
Location: South Africa
Company Description
Contemplate Wild builds data and software systems for wildlife conservation, combining engineering, geospatial analysis, and data science to support monitoring and decision-making. We integrate sources such as animal tracking, field observations, IoT devices, and imagery into tools for real-time alerting, analytics, and operational workflows used in reserves across southern Africa – including Kruger National Park.
Role Description
You'll be building and shipping features across the full stack – from backend APIs and data pipelines through to frontend dashboards. The split is roughly 60-70% backend, 20-30% frontend, and 10-20% infrastructure work. You'll work to translate real-world conservation problems into working software. That means you'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity. The problems are well-defined, but the solutions rarely come pre-specified. You’ll be working on systems that are actively used by field teams including rangers and conservation managers which means reliability matters.
What You'll Work On
Backend (primary focus)
- Build and extend REST APIs in FastAPI
- Design and query PostgreSQL schemas – including PostGIS for geospatial data
- Integrate with external systems like EarthRanger, Movebank, and Sigfox
- Write clean, testable Python that handles real data at scale
Frontend
- Contribute to a React 19 + TypeScript dashboard (Vite, Tailwind, React Query)
- Build data-heavy UIs – filterable tables, interactive maps (MapLibre GL), timelines, charts
- Wire up API integrations into frontend workflows
Infrastructure
- Work with AWS Lambda functions, S3 pipelines, and event-driven services (SQS, EventBridge)
- Take ownership of deployments (CloudWatch, AWS SAM, Docker)
- Help maintain CI/CD pipelines
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field or equivalent demonstrated experience
- Strong Python – 3+ years of shipping production code
- Experience building APIs (FastAPI, Flask, or Django)
- Solid SQL and relational database fundamentals (Postgres preferred)
- Comfortable with React + TypeScript
- Experience integrating with external APIs
- Cloud Experience (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Git and collaborative development workflows
Advantageous Experience
- Specific exposure to AWS (Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, etc.) is a strong plus but not required – you should be willing to learn quickly.
- Geospatial exposure (PostGIS, GeoJSON, etc)
- Async Python
- Event-driven architecture patterns
- Docker
- Exposure to data engineering or ML workflows
How to Apply
Send your CV and a short paragraph (5–10 sentences) on why this role interests you and tell us about one technical project you’ve worked on that you’re proud of (professional or personal).
Email: [email protected]
Optional but encouraged: include a GitHub profile