John White
With over 30 years of birdwatching experience, John White, CEO, and Co-founder of Birda, merges his passion for nature and technology with expertise gained from companies like Coca-Cola and Deutsche Bank. With a passion for writing content that helps people connect with nature and an MBA from the University of Cape Town, he's known for his ability to simplify complex concepts. As Birda’s CEO, John’s been featured on Fox News, ABC News, and BBC Radio, as one of the leading voices in birdwatching today. With a flair for bird photography and a love for all things avian, he's not just a CEO but also a dedicated field tester for Birda. Off-duty, he enjoys swimming, running, windsurfing, skiing, and family time. Follow his adventures on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn for a glimpse into one of the people behind Birda's success.
This position has been filled
📄 Summary
- Project Officer – Field & Locations Guide
- 2+ years experience
- £22k pa+ DOE
- Work in conservation while still paying your bills
- Mostly remote – 1 day a fortnight in London (Kings Cross)
- Candidates must be resident in the UK
🦉 About Birda
Our purpose is to help people experience the natural world so that they’ll fight to protect it. We are building a birding app for anyone who is curious about the living world. Enabling people to record and share their birding experiences so that they can motivate themselves and others to spend more time outside.
We are building ‘Strava for Birdwatching’. Even in 2022, a birder’s main field tool is a notebook. We think we can do better than that. We are building an app that will enhance the humble notebook by adding GPS-enabled mapping, gamified challenges and social features too. Think ‘Pokemon Go’ in real life.
We’ve been going since Jan and are growing quickly. We are live in Europe and Southern Africa and heading to the US imminently. We move quickly but take a great deal of care and responsibility in what we do, quality matters to us and so does our users’ data security.
The team is currently made up of:
- 👨🏻💼 John – CEO and spreadsheet menace
- 👸🏻 Natalie – Design queen
- 👨🏻💻 Dom – CTO
- 💁♀️Silvia – UX/UI wiz
- 👨🏻🎤 Dave – Senior Software Engineer
- 🧔 Tim – Associate Software Engineer
- 👨🔬 Morgan – Associate Software Engineer
- 👩💻 Sarah – Community Engagement Manager
🔭 What we are looking for
We are looking for a meticulous and highly structured person to help us curate and populate Birda’s global field guide and locations guide. Being able to work on your own initiative is a really important part of this role, as is working closely with a team and communicating effectively.
The primary requirement of the role is to source and populate Birda’s field guide and locations database with a variety of content (copy, images, video). You will need to have excellent organisation and planning skills, meticulous attention to detail, and be able to coordinate a range of projects simultaneously.
You are good at your job and care about the quality of your work. You’ll need a solid knowledge of birds and taxonomy as well as an avid interest in conservation and nature. Outside should be your happy place and you own a sturdy pair of shoes or boots.
Requirements
- Curating the Birda field guide
- Documenting what different species images are required
- Sourcing required images, videos & bird calls for each species
- Curating the Birda locations database
- Documenting major birdwatching locations
- Sourcing images, videos, GIS data pertaining to birding locations
- Manage public participation in sourcing content for locations
- Assisting with taxonomy, species list & species distribution updates
Responsibilities
- An experienced birder – LBJ’s and gulls are no problem to you
- You are meticulous and proud of it
- Solid understanding of taxonomy
- Spreadsheet pro with stacks of experience working with large datasets
- Keen photographer (ideally with a focus on birds)
- Experience with GIS system would be a plus
💵 / 💚 What we give in return
Purpose – Your life is too precious to spend it making something that doesn’t matter. Many of the greatest challenges that all humans will face both now and in the future will involve managing climate change. Encouraging an appreciation of the natural world is a small but vital part of rising to these challenges. We believe that getting people excited about the plants and animals that inhabit our planet will lead to people making different decisions about how they lead their lives.
Money – Of course, you can’t pay your rent / mortgage / deliveroo habit on good feelings so we’ll be paying a respectable salary. We won’t be able to compete with banks or large tech companies though, so our mission will need to matter to you.
Share options – We have an employee-friendly (gradual vesting, long exercise period) share options grant. If you stick with us, you’ll share in any success we achieve. It’s still very early days for us which means that the amount of equity on offer will be meaningful – it’s your baby too.
Flexible working – Work when you are productive. For Dom that’s 6.00 in the morning but he’s weird 🙄
Other stuff – There’s all the usual holiday (we’ll make you take it) and equipment stuff too. Although not every startup has loaner cameras 😉 (Bridge, DSLR & Mirrorless).
🦠 Post-pandemic working
We continue to all work remotely as we are spread all over the UK and chat over Slack and Google Meet. We’ve liked saving time, money and our carbon footprint by not travelling, but we’ve also really missed not hanging out together – both professionally and socially.
So we currently divide our time up into ‘doing’ and ‘collaborating’. Doing can be done wherever you choose, but collaborating should be done in person, somewhere quiet with whiteboards and coffee. Like an office. Right now that’s a day (Wednesday) a fortnight in London (Kings Cross).
👩🏽💼 Interview Process
This will all be remote…cute pets joining in is a bonus. While there are a few stages, we’ll move as quickly as you can. Nobody likes an interview process that takes months.
👋🏻 Step 1 - Say hi to Birda
15-minute introduction with John White our Founder and CEO. Find out if you think it’s worth going through the hassle of the rest of the process…
🏠 Step 2 - Take home thing
Yes, we know you don’t like these, and we are sorry but we try to make it as painless as possible. We send you a list of birds and you’ll need to curate them for our species guide, hopefully you’ll find it a breeze to complete and there’s no time pressure, you can complete it at your leisure.
💼 Step 3 - On-site interview
This will be at our office in Kings Cross, London. You’ll be speaking with Natalie / John, two of the co-founders and should allow for 1-2 hours. Don’t worry we’ll bring snacks!
There’ll be 3 sections:
- Talk about your experience/ambitions
- Chat through your ideas about how we can quickly and efficiently populate our field guides with quality content. This is for all of us to get an idea of what it’s like to work together.
- Your turn to interview us, ask us anything and don’t hold back. Have some concerns? Now’s the time to raise them. It’s a big decision and we want to take every opportunity to ensure it’s the right one for everybody.
🤔 Step 4 - Ask us anything
This is a follow-up call with some combination of Dom / Natalie / John. Any concerns or issues you want to be clarified – now’s the time. It’s a big decision for everyone and we want to take every opportunity to ensure it’s the right one for everybody.
✍️ Applications
Please email us a cover letter and your CV via the button below.
