Software Engineer (Product)

Cartesian is building spatial intelligence for indoor environments to drive operational efficiency. We’re tackling one of the biggest challenges in the $35T global retail industry: in-store inventory visibility. Our platform delivers accurate indoor positioning and actionable product location insights, helping retailers streamline operations, optimize workflows, and reduce inefficiencies. Leveraging wireless signals, we provide a uniquely scalable, infrastructure-free solution already deployed by international fashion brands.

Founded by an MIT engineering professor and alum behind the award-winning, patented core technologies, Cartesian spun out in 2023. Originally backed by the prestigious SBIR Award from the US National Science Foundation, we've bootstrapped to a live product that's now deployed in over a dozen countries and have been aggressively scaling in the market.

Our first product is the only indoor inventory positioning system that operates on existing handheld devices.  We are expanding to more enterprise customers, each with slightly different integration and product needs. Thus, we are looking for more engineers on the team to interact closely with customers, the product team, and other internal teams. You will craft our technology into useful applications combining the physical world, data, and human interaction.

Today, engineering serves three core user groups:

1. The retail stores themselves (store associates, managers, HQ, etc.), who are looking to find, track, and analyze inventory efficiently and seamlessly.
2. Our internal research teams who continuously improve our spatial AI, require high-quality datasets for training new models, and explore entirely new product capabilities.
3. Our internal product and business teams who need to understand usage trends, explore new markets (e.g. warehouses, distribution centers, manufacturing), and onboard new customers.

You will work closely with all of these groups to both figure out what to build and ensure it can be built for performance, maintainability, security, quality, and scalability.

This is a generalist role where you will primarily work across the stack to own features end-to-end, but also contribute to internal platform improvements like infrastructure, CI, and architecture. Examples of work include:

• Implementing new user-facing features that help retail associates locate items within physical stores (e.g. enabling customers to build and manage their own store maps)
• Building mobile and web tools that generate high-quality datasets for our R&D team, powering the models behind our spatial AI
• Building dashboards that turn raw usage into product insights (e.g. usage patterns, value-delivery, experimental results) for internal teams and customers
• Building scalable web services and intuitive APIs with modern Python
• Managing cloud infrastructure using IaC tools, including Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform
• Improving CI/CD pipelines to help us ship quickly and with high quality

Our team is still small, and there’s no dedicated PM assigning out tickets. Engineers are expected to closely collaborate with all aspects of the business to figure out what needs to get done, pull in the right people for prioritization and sign-off, and move projects forward autonomously.

The team works in-person 5 days a week by default, right in Kendall Square next to MIT and the Charles River.

Engineers succeed at Cartesian not based on what they know, but how they approach problems, learn what they don’t know, and continuously make the product, team, and company better. Our interview process aims to assess the engineering principles and judgment (why and how) that you’ve refined through experience, rather than the experience itself.

We look for the following traits:

• High Growth: You’re intrinsically curious. You have a track record of learning hard things quickly. You actively seek critical feedback from others. You work on things that matter, even if they are unfamiliar. You’re defined by where you’re going, not where you started.
• High Ownership: You have high expectations for yourself and others, and never settle for mediocrity. You deliver outcomes not tickets. You know that the last 10% of work takes 90% of the effort, and still get it done on-time. You care about the system as a whole: making things easier for the next person, and fixing problems rather than waiting for others to do so.
• Low Ego: You don’t know everything. You want the best ideas to win. Nothing is below you. You are a good leader, listener and mentor.
• Engineering Excellence: You default to simple, maintainable solutions. You are intentional with your decisions and balance technical quality, business priorities, and long-term maintainability. You know that aligning on why and what is much more important than the how. You communicate well in English, not just Python.

For the product-focused role in particular, you should have a passion for iteratively refining user experience while maintaining a high-standard for engineering quality.

• We are looking for slope, not experience. That said, to be competitive, we expect 2+ years of experience building software products at a company with a high engineering bar.
• Passion for building applications in the physical world, and comfortable with getting out from behind the laptop – going on-site to stores, talking with users, testing on real devices, and using that as product input.
• Track record of driving complex, end-to-end features.
• Good judgement on how to structure software applications for development speed, maintainability, and performance.
• Excellent written communication (designing projects, sharing progress updates, reviewing other people’s work, getting buy-in on decisions, etc.)

We’re a fast-moving MIT startup at an important inflection point for our product growth and direction. We are building a talent-dense team of engineers and applied researchers to solve hard, high-impact problems in retail operations.

You will have outsized ownership and autonomy. You will grow extremely quickly and make important contributions to our product, engineering culture, and company direction. We will push you to become a better engineer, and we will expect the same from you. 

• Backend: FastAPI, Python, Hatchet
• Mobile: Android, Kotlin
• Hardware: RFID & Barcode Readers (e.g. Zebra)
• Data: Postgres, Blob Storage, Parquet
• Infrastructure: Azure, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform
• Machine Learning: PyTorch, Ray
• Frontend: Next.js, Typescript, Tailwind

The typical interview process takes 2-3 weeks from start to finish. We can move more quickly for candidates who might have a short timeline or competing offers.

1. Screen (20 minutes)
2. Behavioral Interview with Isaac (Co-Founder) (30 minutes): We front-load this conversation, as it is the best predictor of long-term fit, and we’d rather find that out early for both sides.
3. Three Technical Interviews (45-90 minutes each): 
1. Project Deep-Dive: Tell us about a recent project you worked on. We want to know the messy details and walk away learning something new.
2. Coding Exercise (Live): Based on a simplified, but realistic task. The live aspect helps us understand your approach and allows you to ask questions.
3. System Design: How would you design a complex, multi-part feature?
4. References
5. Offer!

$100,000 - $180,000 annually + equity