Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Connected Water is an AI-native, hardware-agnostic platform that helps water utilities turn siloed operational data into traceable decisions and work. The Founding Engineer will help take the validated prototype to a reliable v1.0 product by shipping platform features, integrating utility data, productionizing hydraulic intelligence, and supporting early team growth.
Responsibilities
- Ship the features and platform hardening that get us from prototype to v1.0 and our first paying customers
- Harden the platform toward reliable, multi-tenant operation — a utility should be able to onboard in weeks, not months
- Integrate messy, multi-vendor utility data (metering, GIS, SCADA, sensors) into one trustworthy operational layer
- Collaborate directly with the founding team at a high level on feature development and implementation. You're a strong technical voice in these conversations, not just an implementer waiting for a spec
- Help figure out what from the existing prototype carries forward as-is, what needs rework, and what should be cut
- The platform's edge is physics-grounded hydraulic intelligence and a water-native AI assistant operators trust. Your opportunity: the hydraulic modeling engine is currently a research asset, not a shipped production capability — the real work here is finishing and productionizing it, not maintaining something already built
- Build with provenance and traceability in mind from the start. Operators and regulators need answers they can stand behind: clear assumptions, versioned logic, evidence
- As the company scales, help source and interview the next engineers. This is a hiring-signal role, not a people-management one — you're helping build the team, not running performance reviews
Skills
- You've shipped in ambiguous, early-stage environments before — ideally at more than one startup, or with equivalent founding/early-hire experience. You've seen what it's like when there's no clear spec yet
- You're genuinely hands-on: coding is most of what you do day to day, not something you occasionally dip into between meetings
- You have solid AWS architecture and implementation experience
- You're comfortable inheriting a working prototype and helping make hard, reasoned keep-vs-rebuild calls, in partnership with people who already bring real architecture experience to the table
- You're comfortable contributing to design prototypes and then developing from them
- You're fluent in data-intensive, AI-enabled products — integrating heterogeneous external data, and building for the trust, accuracy, and auditability that operational or regulated users demand. That means comfortable with math, too
- You can articulate engineering trade-offs in product terms: you know the difference between building it right and shipping it now, and when each one matters
- You have some customer empathy — comfortable getting on a call with a pilot utility, understanding what's actually blocking them versus what's a nice-to-have
- You're willing to move across the stack and across problem types as the week demands
- You're mission-oriented: a genuine interest in water, infrastructure, or sustainability, not just an interesting technical problem to add to a resume
- Location: Remote-first / distributed. US Central Time is ideal
- Commitment: Full-time
- Water, utility, or infrastructure domain experience
- Hydraulic or physical-systems modeling (for example EPANET / WNTR) and geospatial data (GIS, spatial indexing)
- LLM-based or agentic products for expert users, where trust and accuracy matter more than novelty
- IoT, time-series, or sensor data at scale (advanced metering, SCADA, or similar)
- Prior founding engineer, early startup hire, or co-founder experience specifically
Benefits
- Meaningful equity, in line with seed-stage founding engineer norms
- Remote-first / distributed work arrangement
Company Overview