Software Engineer (Product)

Cartesian Systems; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Cartesian in Kendall Square near MIT is seeking versatile software engineers to own features end-to-end across the stack, from front-end to cloud infrastructure.

You will collaborate with customers, product, and internal teams to ship scalable, secure, and maintainable software using Python, Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern CI/CD practices.

The role emphasizes learning, ownership, and low ego, with the team expanding as we scale our indoor spatial intelligence platform.

Qualifications

• Willingness to own features end-to-end across the stack.
• Strong collaboration with product, customers, and internal teams.
• Commitment to scalable, maintainable, secure software.

Responsibilities

• Own features end-to-end across the stack and data plane.
• Collaborate with product, customers, and internal teams to align on requirements.
• Contribute to infrastructure, CI/CD, and architecture improvements.
• Build scalable web services and APIs using Python and modern tooling.

Skills

Problem solving

Rapid learning

English communication

Tools

Python

Kubernetes

Terraform

Helm

Job description

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 pipelines to help us ship quickly and with high quality

Our team is still small, and there's no dedicated PM assigning out tickets. Engineers are expected to closely collaborate with all aspects of the business to figure out what needs to get done, pull in the right people for prioritization and sign‑off, and move projects forward autonomously.

The team works in-person 5 days a week by default, right in Kendall Square next to MIT and the Charles River.

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 product-focused role in particular, you should have a passion for itera