Staff software engineer, data products

About Watershed

Watershed is the enterprise sustainability platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting including CSRD, and drive real decarbonization. We are looking for team members who love product-building, want to work hard at a mission-oriented startup, and will collaborate with us in shaping the culture of a growing team.

We have offices in San Francisco, New York, Denver, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Mexico City, and remote team members across the US and Europe. We hope that you’ll be interested in joining us!

The role

As part of this work, you will:

• Design, build, and maintain the core backend platform responsible for calculating and processing sustainability impact assessments across global customer value chains.

• Architect and implement robust, scalable data models and systems that ensure consistency, integrity, and clear semantics for complex value chain and climate-related data.

• Develop and operate high-performance backend systems and data pipelines to efficiently ingest, transform, and harmonize external and customer datasets into reliable, production-grade data assets.

• Focus on the accuracy of the data that systems produce and can dive deep to ensure that all changes can be validated to protect customers from unintended data changes.

• Collaborate closely with climate scientists and data scientists to translate complex methodologies into high-quality, validated, and performant platform capabilities.

• Implement comprehensive validation, quality checks, and monitoring processes within the backend platform to ensure high reliability and correctness of customer-facing sustainability data.

• Build abstractions, tooling, and infrastructure that empower data scientists, analysts, and other engineering teams to safely and efficiently integrate new calculation methods and data processing logic.

• Partner with product, scientists and engineering leaders to define the roadmap and build the platforms and capabilities for serving customers with critical sustainability data and methods.

You might be a fit if you:

• We are looking for Senior to Staff level for this role.

• Have 6+ years of industry experience in backend software engineering with a strong focus on building and maintaining scalable systems for data storage, processing, and retrieval.

• Are fluent in Python and SQL, and have experience with data pipelining and transformation frameworks. Typescript is a plus!

• Have experience designing and implementing backend systems that reliably ingest, validate, and structure data from diverse, messy, or inconsistent sources.

• Care deeply about engineering craft: writing well-tested, maintainable code and designing robust system architectures and abstractions that scale.

• Are comfortable building backend platforms and tooling that will be used by other engineers, scientists, and analysts.

• Communicate complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical collaborators.

• Thrive in environments that combine systematic organization with attention to detail, ensuring data integrity and system reliability while moving quickly.

• Are motivated by solving sustainability challenges and excited to do so at a fast-paced startup.

Must be willing to work from an office 4 days per week (except for remote roles)

Watershed has hub offices in San Francisco, New York, London, and Mexico City and satellite offices in Denver, Sydney, Paris, and Berlin. Where we have offices, employees are expected to be in office for 4 days per week. Certain jobs are open to being remote and will be specifically noted on the jobs page and in the job description if so.

What’s the interview process like?

It starts the same for every candidate: getting to know the team members through 1 to 2 conversations about Watershed, your experience, and your interests. Next steps can vary by role, but usual next steps are a skill or experience interview (e.g. a coding interview for an engineer, a portfolio review for a designer, deeper experience call for other roles) which leads to a virtual or in person interview panel. We prioritize transparency and lack of surprise throughout the process.

What if I need accommodations for my interview?

At Watershed, we are dedicated to ensuring an inclusive recruitment process. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities, long-term conditions, mental health needs, religious observances, neurodivergence, or pregnancy-related support requirements. If you need assistance during your process, please contact your recruiter.