Senior Software Engineer / “Founding” Engineer / CT01JS

About

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.
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.

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. Depending on a level (based on your skills and experiences) and your years of experience, you
can expect a salary between €70k and €100k for 10 to 20 years of experience. You can also expect equity
worth 180-270k$ 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

The interview process can be adjusted based on your constraints, but in general we go with:
● One or two short calls with Romain to ensure that we both want to proceed.
● An online or in-person 1.5 hour interview with Marc and Martin to check the fit between you and our
expectations and the company environment.
● If possible, we’d love to have a half-day with you in-person to cover the technical expectations. It’s
the perfect opportunity to meet other members of the team, share more about our software, discuss
technical design/architecture questions, and experience working together on some code.