Backend Engineer

About the Company

Cartesian is building machine learning systems to map the indoor world at scale using wireless signals and mobile computer vision.

We are tackling one of the biggest unsolved problems in the $35-trillion global retail industry: inventory visibility within stores. Our first-of-its-kind inventory intelligence product is enabling unprecedented indoor positioning and insights to solve this problem for retailers, starting with international fashion brands.

Our founders are an MIT engineering professor and an alum who invented the award-winning patented technologies underlying Cartesian. Since spinning out in 2023, we’ve bootstrapped to a deployed product, secured the highly selective SBIR grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and are generating revenue from paying customers.

About the Role

We are seeking an exceptional engineer to help us 1000x our product scale. You will play a critical role in the architecture and implementation of growing our API, data, machine learning inference, and DevOps platforms. 

The ideal candidate is a generalist, fast-mover, and excellent at communicating clear timelines, results, and new ideas. You will be expected to own a key sub-system, but also collaborate with the rest of the team to enhance our product’s performance, reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness as our user base and data volumes grow.

We work in person in Kendall Square, right next to MIT and the Charles River.

Technical Qualifications

Our highest priority is finding exceptional individuals, and as a generalist position, we have the flexibility to tailor the job to a specific niche in our growing team. However, we expect you to have 4+ years of demonstrated expertise in many of the following areas:

• Production-grade, modern Python and associated tooling

• Managing cloud infrastructure (ideally on Azure), including Kubernetes

• Data structures, database query optimization and efficient data pipelines for TB-scale datasets.

• Distributed computing frameworks (e.g. Ray, Dask, Spark, etc) for compute-heavy workloads

• Improving CI/CD pipelines to help us ship quickly and with high quality

• Monitoring & observability to keep our enterprise customers happy
  

About You

• Good problem solver and able to think critically about system design impacts our engineering direction and customer experience.

• Thrive in fast-paced environments with shifting priorities.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

Nice to Have

• Previously worked on core systems at a high-growth startup

• Familiar with GPU infrastructure and batch processing pipelines

• Ownership over the deployment and monitoring of product-critical systems

• Past collaboration with research teams (e.g. machine learning)

Why Join Us

• Join a fast-moving MIT startup at a product inflection point

• Build next-generation retail technology

• Work alongside world class engineers and applied researchers