About You
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 security-focused role in particular, you should have a passion for building secure systems, teams, and products at all stages of the software lifecycle.
Minimum Requirements
- We are looking for slope, not experience. That said, this is not an entry level position and to be competitive, we expect 3+ years of experience building software products at a company with a high engineering bar, with real exposure to security-minded work (e.g. application and access-control security, infrastructure and pipeline security, or audits/certifications).
- Track record of driving complex, end-to-end projects.
- Strong opinions 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.