Senior Software Engineer / “Founding” Engineer

About Carbonfact

The fashion industry is responsible for approximately 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). More and more companies are using Carbon Management Platforms to measure and create reduction plans. However, most of these solutions are generalist, so they are not tailored for a fashion brand, which requires detailed insights on the impacts of materials, manufacturing processes, or the “life cycle analysis” impact of its products.

This is why we developed Carbonfact, the only Carbon Management Platform dedicated to the textile and fashion industry. Our platform automates life-cycle assessment at the product level, enabling brands to gain a high resolution of their Scope 3 emissions and model out product-level change on the company’s broader environmental trajectory.

Brands and fashion groups are already using Carbonfact (e.g. New Balance, Allbirds, AdoreMe, ArmedAngels, etc.) and we raised $2 million from Y Combinator, Alven, and angel investors in 2021.

Why do we need to hire

We launched our offering less than a year ago and are experiencing significant sales growth, including securing a major customer with over $1 billion in revenue and discussing with even larger ones. We clearly sense the market demand for what we're building and we have lots of ideas we would love to build to help brands reduce their carbon footprints faster!

We started building simulation and modeling tools that enable brands to estimate the impact of design or supply chain changes on their future catalog, but we're just at the beginning. To help design teams, we could also incorporate cost elements and include automated optimization to suggest the best combinations of materials and suppliers to optimize both for carbon and cost. And in not so long, we'll also want to optimize by taking into account other indicators (the PEF standard defines 16 of them).

We also have a lot to build around the relationship with suppliers. Brands have to deal with lots of suppliers (1000+ for the big ones), and collecting the right data from the supplier is critical to avoid survey fatigue on the supplier end. We can build tools to help the brands collect the right information at the right time, so that they ask the questions that can really make a change.

We'll also have a lot on our plate with our maturing market: upcoming regulations will make our LCA calculation engine a software that must be highly reliable, we will probably have to support different calculation methodologies (we already know that France will be slightly different from EU's) and building the key components our customers will expect from their Carbon Management Platform: carbon accounting and reporting, environmental labeling, etc.

What you should be excited about

Working on climate!

First of all, we expect you’re excited about working on climate-change solutions and being part of decarbonizing the fashion industry! There are not that many actors that can help the fashion industry reduce carbon emissions and we believe Carbonfact can avoid hundreds of millions of tons of GHG every year. 

Engineering challenges

We have interesting problems to solve, as we are transforming the way the industry is doing Life Cycle Analysis. As of now it’s most often a slow and laborious process, requiring getting lots of data points from the supply chain and waiting months before getting results for a few products. We are making this a few weeks for thousands of products.

To accomplish this, we are reinventing it: collecting data, modeling products and calculating results. We combine pragmatism and strong data and software engineering skills, to focus on what matters most and help our customers efficiently take action to reduce their product footprints.

Our company operating system

We have a hybrid and international company: part of the team meets every week in our Paris office and a few team members are full-remote (Max in France, Bahareh in Berlin and Lidia in Amsterdam). 

We favor asynchronous and written communication (especially for knowledge management and decision making) and use synchronous online or in-person communication for problem solving and idea generation, and the few weekly meetings to maintain some bonding (less than 3h a week).

We complete that with 3-4 retreats a year where we gather the full team and use it as an occasion to create a stronger team bonding and work on the next 3-6 months challenges.

Our values

Solution-Minded

• We value concrete action over theory.
• We address problems and challenges with a positive mindset.
• “No matter what the situation, there always will be the possibility to make the future better or worse than it would have been otherwise.” - Dennis Meadows.

Collective-First

• Great accomplishments come from efficient organizations.
• We over-invest our own time to the benefit of the other teams.
• We are low-ego, polite, concise, and thoughtful.

Fact-Based

• We bring facts instead of opinions.
• We are easy to convince if we are shown the evidence.
• We strive for tangible impact.

Our technology stack

Our platform is built on a strong data engineering foundation developed by Max using Python and BigQuery. It handles both the top of the funnel (collecting, normalizing, and enriching data) and the bottom (the views consumed by our customer-facing SaaS web app and used for the data analyzes we use and share with our customers).

The customer-facing web app is built in TypeScript using React (NextJS) and a NestJS/PrismaJS backend, but we are flexible (and still moving) regarding frameworks and technologies.

We strive for a lean mindset, so we favor buying over building for non-core parts of our product. Our infrastructure is thus built on many PaaS and SaaS solutions (e.g., Heroku, Vercel, Defer, Postmark, Retool).

What will be your role

You will be a core member of the "founding engineers" team, which includes Max, our Head of Data; David, our first Founding Software Engineer; and Romain, CTO and co-founder. You will have many responsibilities, with the end goal of making our customers delighted and helping them reduce their environmental impacts. Those include: 

• Thoroughly understanding and questioning the problem we're trying to solve, listening to our customers, and working with our CPO Martin and our designer Lucien to design the best solution (matching our appetite, being pragmatic but still reliable and maintainable).
• Running, supporting, and iterating what you have built.
• Building our software engineering foundations, from structuring our practices to interviewing future engineers.
• Proposing and contributing to the bets that drive our 6-week cycles.

What we are looking for

We're looking for a senior full-stack software engineer who can work on both the backend (LCA engine, APIs) and frontend (customer-facing webapp) in our environment. You should be comfortable with Typescript, NodeJS, and React; however, long experience in this stack is not required, as we believe strong software engineering skills involve being language/framework-agnostic.

We need someone who thrives in an early stage environment: small team, fast-moving, and with lots of ownership. Significant experience in an early stage environment, especially as a co-founder, is an excellent signal. You should be pragmatic, with excellent "hacking" skills and a good business acumen to solve problems and test solutions quickly.

You should be comfortable working in an international, remote, and mostly asynchronous environment. Fluency in English and French is required.

You can work full-remote, but we would like to be able to meet in person at our Paris office on a monthly basis (e.g., two to three days per month).

Work environment and compensation

We determine the compensation package (salary + equity) based on an internal grid which is shared with employees. At the time of hiring, we’ll determine your level based on the position, your track-record and experience. You will then be promoted to higher levels based on your performance and your impact on the company. Each level is associated with a predetermined compensation.

For this position, you can expect a salary between €70k and €80k for Staff Engineer levels, up to €87k for exceptional track-records (e.g. CTO in a scale-up). You can also expect equity with a low strike price and employee-friendly exercise rights.

In line with our efficient work environment, we'll do our best to provide you with the best tools available, from hardware to software (e.g. IDEs, GitHub Copilot, etc.).

We'll cover 100% of your health insurance with Alan at the best coverage level.

How to learn more about us

• Check our team and our LinkedIn pages.
• Have a look at this interview of Marc on Fashionista and a post by Armed Angels about selecting us as their carbon footprint tool.
• Say hi and come take a coffee at our office in Paris, or let us know you want to join our next Climate Tech^2 meetup we organize from time to time!

Application and interview process

Please fill in the form to let us know more about you if you’re interested!

The interview process can be adjusted based on your constraints, but in general we go with:

• One first short call (~30’) with Romain to ensure our searches align.
• Written questions (non-technical, ~30’, at home and async) to go further on some key traits and test your written communication.
• The “deep dive” interview (1h30-2h, online or in person) with Romain to go through all your experiences and understand your key personal traits, achievements and motivations.
• Half-day technical interview, at the office. We’ll cover your technical expertise with a sequence of 3 45’ sessions: broad technical discussions, a collaborative software design session and a pairing session on a real need we have at the moment.
• Final interview with Marc or Martin (1h-1h30, online or in person, possibly grouped with the technical half-day), to check the fit between you and our expectations and the company environment.
• 3 reference calls with a few persons identified during the “deep dive”.