Lead Engineer - Sustainability Intelligence Platform

Context

We are Sustaain, a data-for-sustainability startup building a sustainability intelligence platform for complex supply chains such as coffee and cocoa with an initial focus on data management for European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) compliance and risk management.

Over the next 6 months, we’re shipping production-grade compliance workflows: portal UX + APIs, traceability + geospatial services, auditability, and document ingestion & automation as a first-class module. This sits at the heart of the unified compliance operations vision we’re building with large commodity traders.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to be the production backbone of the engineering team.

We already have functional endpoints and workflows built by our data/science team that are commercially viable. Your mission is to harden them for production, improve scalability and reliability, and establish best practices across the codebase and delivery process.

You will report to our CTO and work closely with product, science, and delivery to ensure what we ship is robust, observable, and maintainable. This is a high-ownership role with direct influence on our engineering culture and platform architecture.

Responsibilities

- Ensure best practices in software engineering: code quality, testing strategy, code review, versioning, CI/CD, deployment, monitoring, incident response.
- Collaborate with data/science to turn analytical workflows into production-grade services (APIs, batch jobs, orchestrated pipelines).
- Define and document technical specifications, interfaces, and system architecture with the CTO, and with product/delivery when needed.
- Implement secure, scalable ingestion and processing patterns for traceability, supplier, and geospatial data (in collaboration with data engineering).
- Contribute to delivery readiness: environment separation, UAT support, go-live checklists, rollback plans, and production support playbooks.
- Act as a key internal reference for software engineering: hands-on and pragmatic.

6-Month Outcomes (what “good” looks like)

- Endpoints and workflows moved from “works” to “production-grade”: tested, monitored, documented, and scalable.
- A clean delivery pipeline: predictable releases, observable services, and operational discipline (alerts, dashboards, runbooks).
- Clear technical interfaces between services (portal ↔ APIs ↔ data services ↔ integrations), with fewer hidden dependencies.
- A stronger engineering culture: standards that improve speed and reduce breakage.

Required Skills & Experience

- Strong software engineering fundamentals, production mindset, and a track record of shipping.
- Solid backend experience; current codebase is mostly Python (FastAPI), with room to improve and evolve.
- Strong understanding of APIs, system integration, and database management (SQL/NoSQL).
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and modern delivery practices (containers/Docker, CI/CD, monitoring; GCP is a plus).
- Ability to design and communicate clear technical specs, including edge cases and failure modes.
- Comfort with ambiguity: you can define the problem, measure it, and iterate fast.
- You care about correctness and accountability (this is compliance, not content).

Nice-to-Have

- Familiarity or strong interest with frontend development (not required, but helpful for end-to-end thinking, and this will clearly help cut corners).
- Experience with data-heavy platforms (geospatial, graph-like data, large ingestion workloads).
- Exposure to regulated or audit-driven environments.

What We Offer

- A high-impact role: you’ll shape the foundations of engineering in a company that ships real systems to real clients.
- Remote-first, flexible team rituals, and real ownership.
- Competitive compensation and equity (early team).
- A company that values clarity over jargon, and delivery over theatre.

If you’re interested, share what you’ve shipped (resume and links welcome) and why it mattered to: [contact@sustaain.org](mailto:contact@sustaain.org) and get ready for no BS interviews followed shortly by hands-on integration in the team.