Software Engineer (Product)

The posting, as Cartesian Systems wrote it

About the Company

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.

About the Role

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

• The retail stores themselves (store associates, managers, HQ, etc.), who are looking to find, track, and analyze inventory efficiently and seamlessly.
• Our internal research teams who continuously improve our spatial AI, require high-quality datasets for training new models, and explore entirely new product capabilities.
• 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 pipelin

[…]
nd 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.)

Why Now

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.

Technology Stack

• 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

Interview Timeline

Once you've been selected for screening, the typical interview process takes 2 weeks from start to finish. If a different timeline is better for you, please let us know as soon as possible.

• Screen (20 minutes)
• Behavioral Interview with Isaac (Co-Founder) (45 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.
• Three Technical Interviews (45-90 minutes each):
• 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.
• Coding Exercise (Live): Based on a simplified, but realistic task. The live aspect helps us understand your approach and allows you to ask questions.
• System Design: How would you design a complex, multi-part feature?
• References
• Offer!

Compensation

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