Senior Software Engineer - Backend/Distributed Systems

About Earth

At Earth, we believe how we say farewell matters. Our mission is to transform the end-of-life experience by offering families a beautiful, sustainable alternative to cremation and burial. Instead of traditional methods that harm the environment, our gentle, natural process transforms the body into nutrient-rich soil in just 45 days — returning life to the earth and leaving a meaningful legacy.

This process — sometimes called soil transformation or natural organic reduction (NOR) — is powered by our proprietary vessel technology, which carefully recreates the conditions found in nature.

Earth is the national leader in soil transformation, backed by major investors, and growing fast.

The Role

We’re seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build and evolve Earth’s supervisory control and orchestration platform — the software systems that ensure our soil transformation vessels operate safely, predictably, and reliably across distributed operational environments as we scale.

You will design systems that are observable, resilient, and explicit about state — serving operators, controls engineers, and the business as Earth scales to multiple facilities.

You’ll ensure clean boundaries between what is decided locally and what is coordinated globally, and collaborate with Firmware, Hardware, Product, and Operations to enable a coherent, observable, and resilient automation platform.

What You’ll Do

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement the supervisory software orchestration layer for vessel and facility operations
• Lead the design and evolution of the supervisory software architecture across cloud and edge technologies, including the data storage and communication protocols between components
• Own system behavior related to scheduling, state coordination, configuration management, auditability, and traceability
• Define and maintain APIs and contracts between supervisory software and vessel execution layers
• Build systems for telemetry ingestion, contextualization, and long-term storage
• Ensure the platform is observable, debuggable, and resilient to partial failure
• Support facility rollouts with reliable configuration, deployment, and startup behavior
• Contribute to DevOps practices that support cloud and edge deployments

You are responsible for how the system coordinates, not just how individual control loops behave.

About You

You’re a systems-minded software engineer who excels at designing software that interacts with the physical world. You are comfortable reasoning across components, abstractions, and failure modes, and you care about making complex systems:

• clear rather than implicit
• predictable rather than surprising
• resilient rather than fragile

You are comfortable collaborating with non-software specialists and translating complex system behavior into clear, maintainable software that reduces operational burden, increases trust in automation, and supports a mission you care about.

Qualifications

Required

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally building software for distributed systems, industrial automation, robotics, or supervisory control
• Strong backend software development skills in Python
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts and system-level thinking
• Experience designing APIs and service boundaries
• Experience with event-driven or message-based systems (e.g. MQTT, AMQP, Kafka, etc.)
• Experience building observable systems (logging, metrics, tracing)
• Comfort working with hybrid edge/cloud architectures (AWS, GCP, etc.)
• Experience collaborating with modern DevOps tooling (CI/CD, containerization, cloud-native deployments)
• Experience supporting production systems tied to physical operations
• Ability to collaborate and communicate effectively across a variety of disciplines
• Ability to manage multiple priorities under time constraints and ensure complete, high-quality execution

Preferred

• Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, or related field — or equivalent practical experience
• Familiarity with time-series data and telemetry pipelines
• Experience with real-time and embedded systems
• Exposure to control theory concepts

Travel Expectations

This role will require occasional travel to the Seattle area in order to enable effective, regular in-person collaboration within our R&D facility. Travel to other facility locations around the United States may be required on an as-needed basis for facility and vessel commissioning projects.

Why Earth

• Mission-driven work that makes a lasting impact
• Competitive salary and equity package
• Hybrid work environment (remote-friendly, Seattle preferred)
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) plan
• Unlimited PTO

Join Us

At Earth, our mission is to transform the end-of-life experience — creating a process that restores the planet instead of harming it. If you’re inspired by solving complex technical challenges in service of something deeply human and profoundly environmental, we’d love to hear from you.