Founding Software Engineer

Job Description Founding Software Engineer / Technical Lead

Calx Analytics Remote (California preferred, but not required)

Compensation: Equity-first founding role; salary anticipated following funding.

About Calx

How do we measure the costs of harms that conventional accounting largely ignores? Environmental damage, public health consequences, labor abuses, and other externalities impose enormous costs on society, yet we lack consistent, defensible methods for calculating those costs and incorporating them into financial decisions. We're building the data and decision-intelligence infrastructure to change that. Our platform brings together complex scientific, economic, and other evidence to produce traceable, auditable valuations of environmental, public health, and social harms. By modeling how these costs accumulate and interact, we aim to help institutions better understand risk, evaluate interventions, and make decisions informed by a more complete accounting of economic impact.

We have a working prototype, an established research foundation, and a small interdisciplinary team. We're now looking for an experienced engineer to take a leading role in developing the underlying platform and shaping its technical future.

About the Role

As our Founding Software Engineer / Technical Lead, you'll be responsible for designing, building, and evolving the core data architecture and backend systems that power Calx.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position with substantial autonomy and direct influence over architectural decisions. You'll work closely with our founders, researchers, and engineering team to translate complex scientific and economic requirements into reliable, scalable systems. You'll also help establish engineering practices and technical priorities as the company grows.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of our core data architecture, including relational and graph-structured data.
• Evaluate approaches inspired by Meta's TAO architecture alongside relational and hybrid models.
• Architect and implement backend services, APIs, and data pipelines to support complex data ingestion, querying, and delivery.
• Build reliable systems for data provenance, uncertainty representation, evidence traceability, and quality assessment.
• Develop APIs and data delivery tools for institutional customers.
• Collaborate with researchers and domain experts to integrate complex datasets, scientific models, and analytical outputs into the platform.
• Help establish engineering best practices, including code quality, performance, security, reliability, and maintainability.
• Mentor our junior engineer and contribute to the company's overall technical direction.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience designing, building, and maintaining production data systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and PostgreSQL.
• Demonstrated expertise in data modeling, backend architecture, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience designing and implementing APIs, data pipelines, and reliable data-processing workflows.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, systems design, and performance considerations.
• Excellent technical judgment, with the ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs and balance long-term design goals against the practical demands of an early-stage company.
• Ability to work independently, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively with engineers, researchers, and other domain specialists.

Particularly Valuable Experience

• Graph-oriented architectures, graph databases, or hybrid relational/graph data models.
• Distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
• Complex data ingestion and information extraction.
• Systems involving data provenance, uncertainty, evidence quality, or auditability.
• Early-stage startups or building platforms from the ground up.
• Scientific computing, economic modeling, environmental data, or other interdisciplinary technical applications.

Why Join Calx?

This is an opportunity to help build the technical foundations of a new approach to understanding and measuring economic harm. You'll have meaningful ownership, substantial architectural autonomy, and the opportunity to shape a platform whose calculations must be explainable, traceable, and defensible. We're particularly interested in engineers who enjoy difficult conceptual and technical problems and understand the challenge of building systems that can substantiate and defend their calculations.

Compensation and Commitment

This is an equity-first, early-stage opportunity. Cash salary is not currently available, and salaried compensation is anticipated once the company secures funding. The equity arrangement, engagement structure, and future compensation terms will be discussed transparently with candidates.

We're looking for someone excited by the opportunity to help build a company from an early stage and take meaningful responsibility for its technical development.

How to Apply

Please apply through LinkedIn and tell us a little about the most challenging data system you've built, the architectural decisions involved, and why Calx's mission interests you. We'd love to hear from experienced engineers who are excited by the intersection of ambitious technical architecture, scientific rigor, and real-world impact.