The Company

Sofar is on a mission to connect the world’s oceans. We design, build, and deploy the largest privately owned network of marine weather sensors to power the world’s best marine weather forecasts. Our data helps our customers to increase efficiency and reduce emissions, delivering tools to governments and other stakeholders to understand impacts of climate change on extreme weather and ocean health. We live on Planet Ocean, and our goal is to create the ocean intelligence needed to ensure a sustainable future.

The Role

We are looking for a product-driven software engineer to join our team as we scale and adapt our groundbreaking Wayfinder route optimization service for the maritime transport industry. In this position you will design, develop, iterate, and maintain services in the Wayfinder Optimization Engine – an optimal ship-routing service which includes:

• the generation of optimized routes in response to rapidly changing weather conditions and user-specified constraints to save fuel, emissions, and costs
• the modeling of ships to accurately predict the instantaneous fuel consumption and dynamics of maritime transport vessels across diverse weather scenarios
• the development of features and insights to help our maritime customers navigate the impacts of the complex decision-making required to move high value assets across the worlds’ oceans

The Impact

As our business is growing, we have a pressing need to scale our existing services, and simultaneously grow our scope to accommodate a wider range of customer needs. On the Wayfinder Optimization Engine team, you’ll collaborate with a top-notch team of engineers, product experts, and ocean scientists to translate our maritime customers abstract problems into innovative software solutions. You will spend your time automating human-intensive operational workflows related to providing routing services, evolving our core routing algorithms, adapting our core vessel performance modeling, scaling and constructing software infrastructure, and inventing data-driven insights to help our customers. You will have tangible impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by creating and scaling the technology which enables our customers to sail safe, emissions-reducing, cross-ocean routes.

Our tech stack is a task-based compute infrastructure housed on AWS, and a backend API server to provide our routing & modeling services to other web services in our product. Our modeling, simulation, and optimization are all implemented in Rust. Our web-handling and backend API are implemented in Python. In this role, you will be working with both high- and low-level languages and will be collaborating with engineers who work in Typescript/React to deliver end-to-end features to users.

About You

• Passionate about the opportunity to join a growing mission-driven startup to make a big positive impact on the world
• A great communicator with a collaborative mindset who thrives working cross discipline with other engineers, designers, product managers, and scientists
• 5+ years professional experience as a software engineer
• Proficient in a compiled, non-garbage-collected language (such as Rust, C++, C, etc.)
• Experience in Python or Typescript

Bonus Points:

• Experience building software for optimization problems, pathfinding algorithms, and/or controls systems
• Experience working with modeling, numerical methods and/or data science applications
• Experience working with scaled application deployment and management
• A personal connection to or passion for the oceans

Estimated Salary Range

• $155,000 - $180,000
• The range listed is what we reasonably expect to pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and may be modified in the future. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, experience, and equity package.

Sofar's Commitment to Climate Justice

We at Sofar Ocean acknowledge that careers in the marine sciences “... have traditionally been, and remain, non-diverse work environments”, thereby limiting the entry and prosperity of underrepresented groups in the space. (Johri et al., 2021) Many of these same groups are disproportionately affected by climate change, and are often excluded from decision making that directly address their interests and needs.

We are committed to addressing these climate injustices and highly encourage people who identify as women, LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to apply.

Employee Conduct

It is the responsibility of every employee to contribute to a positive work environment through cooperative and professional interactions with co-workers, customers, and vendors.

Equal Employment Opportunity

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other factors prohibited by law.