Founding Software Engineer

About the Role: As the founding member of our software engineering team, you will have the opportunity to establish best practices and build our go-to market platform. WATS is a climate tech startup decarbonizing businesses with waste operations software.

You will work directly with our founding team to deliver a software platform that meets all the needs a business has on their journey to manage their waste sustainably while reducing their costs and carbon. This role will require you to work across a modern web application stack and make informed decisions about what languages, frameworks, services, and hosting providers we will utilize to scale WATS to 100s of thousands of customers.

About WATS: We are a climate tech startup building innovative software to enable and optimize Waste Management operations within businesses of all sizes. We will stop at nothing to ensure that WATS is the platform for businesses to solve all their waste management needs.

WATS helps businesses streamline their waste operations, report on carbon impacts, and comply with shifting environmental regulations. WATS is led by two female co-founders (Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli and Laura Rosenshine) with over 2 decades of experience in the commercial waste industry with a focus on delivering zero waste solutions in New York City. They are building a SaaS solution that solves the pain points at the intersection of commercial waste management and sustainability. The United States has finally stepped up with monumental climate legislation, and the time to act is now.

Meredith and Laura are die hard zero waste experts and highly motivated to do everything in their power to make WATS a major part of the solution businesses need to change their procedures so that they handle their waste as sustainably as possible.

In June of 2022 WATS joined the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator and received their first VC funding. WATS is currently raising a pre-seed round from investors and has a handful of client beta testers.

Our MVP (minimum viable product) for WATS was developed on Mendix, a low code platform. As the founding software engineer, you will lead the effort to transition WATS to a brand new codebase and architecture, which will provide greater flexibility and scale for our long term success. You will be the first hire in a growing software engineering team with the goal of transforming the zero-waste industry with innovative software.

Your Responsibilities:

• Design, deliver, launch, monitor, and iterate a new application platform for WATS.
• Drive and document all initial architectural decisions; including, server side language, application framework(s), datastore (database, caching, file storage), hosting platforms, CDN, etc.
• Document and execute a migration path from our low code MVP to your new application architecture.
• Establish and maintain a technical roadmap, with a focus on balancing time-to-market considerations while paying down technical debt, introducing new services and frameworks, and proactively addressing architectural deficiencies.
• Establish and maintain software development best standards such as supporting continuous integration / continuous delivery, automated testing, and production monitoring
• Participate in our planning meetings, daily standups (10:30AM EST), engineering meetings, design reviews, etc.
• Interview software engineering candidates, assist hiring managers in setting technical criteria for new engineering hires.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Passionate self-driven software engineer, capable of delivering full stack solutions and driving architectural decisions.
• Expertise in one or more dynamic server side languages, such as Python, Ruby, or NodeJS.
• Hands-on experience with server side technologies, such as SQL, ORMs, MVC frameworks, HTTP APIs, caching, cloud storage, etc.
• Product-oriented mindset. Comfortable translating nontechnical product requirements into code.
• Minimum of 3 years of experience as a software developer delivering web applications.
• Demonstrable understanding of industry practices around DevOps, Version Control, Continuous Deployments, Database design, Web Services, and System Design.
• Be Mission Driven and interested in creating applications that have a social and environmental impact.

Work Authorization: This is a full time role and not open for visa sponsorship - the individual must be a permanent resident or citizen of Canada or the United States.

Annual Salary: $120-$160k (+ sizable equity, benefits, etc.)

Location: New York City, preferred, or remote for the right candidate, our organization operates on an east coast work schedule.

To apply: Please send resume and cover letter to hello@getwats.com. Please include your name and job title in the subject line. Looking for the perfect applicant ASAP, this job was posted August 29, 2022. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis until the job is filled.

WATS is committed to fostering a diverse work environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.