About Wattr.ai
Wattr.ai is building a water, agriculture, and power management platform that tackles resource scarcity at a systemic level. Backed by Rainmatter Capital, we combine IoT, data engineering, and applied AI/ML to help individuals, enterprises, and public institutions access water and power reliably and sustainably. We are an early-stage team moving fast, shipping real-world infrastructure software, and building for long-term impact.
The Role
We are looking for a Technical Architect to own the end-to-end technical blueprint of our platform — from edge devices and sensor ingestion, through cloud data pipelines, to the AI/ML and application layers that customers interact with. You will set the architectural direction, make the big technology bets, and raise the engineering bar across the team.
This is a hands-on architect role. You will write code when it matters, review designs, run technical discovery with customers and partners, and partner closely with the founders on product and platform strategy.
What You Will Do
- Own the platform architecture across edge (IoT/sensors/controllers), cloud backend, data pipelines, AI/ML services, and web/mobile applications.
- Define and evolve the system design: service boundaries, data contracts, event flows, storage choices, and deployment topology across on-prem and cloud.
- Make deliberate technology choices — languages, frameworks, databases, message brokers, ML stacks, IoT protocols — and document the trade-offs behind each decision.
- Design for the realities of the field: intermittent connectivity, low-power devices, noisy sensor data, and deployments in water, agriculture, and power infrastructure.
- Establish engineering standards for code quality, testing, observability, security, and release management, and drive adoption across the team.
- Lead design reviews, mentor senior engineers, and help translate ambiguous product goals into buildable technical plans.
- Partner with product, hardware, and data science teams to ship features end-to-end and to de-risk complex, cross-stack initiatives.
- Own non-functional requirements — scalability, reliability, latency, cost, and security — with clear SLOs and a roadmap to meet them.
- Engage with customers, integrators, and government/utility partners during technical discovery, integration, and deployment.
- Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and manage key technology partnerships and vendors.
What You Bring
Must-have
- 8+ years designing and shipping production software systems, with demonstrable experience as a technical architect, principal engineer, or equivalent.
- Strong command of distributed systems fundamentals — consistency, availability, latency, fault tolerance, and back-pressure.
- Deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern infrastructure-as-code practices.
- Hands-on proficiency in at least two of: Python, Go, Java/Kotlin, TypeScript/Node.js, C/C++ or Rust (for edge workloads).
- Experience designing data-intensive systems: time-series ingestion, stream processing (Kafka / Kinesis / MQTT pipelines), data lakes/warehouses, and analytical workloads.
- Working knowledge of container orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalent), CI/CD, observability, and SRE practices.
- Experience defining APIs and integration contracts across web, mobile, and device surfaces.
- Strong written and verbal communication — you can write a clean RFC, run a crisp design review, and align non-engineering stakeholders.
Nice-to-have
- Prior experience in IoT, industrial automation, cleantech, energy, water, or agritech domains.
- Familiarity with IoT protocols and platforms (MQTT, LwM2M, OPC UA, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, AWS IoT / Azure IoT Hub).
- Exposure to edge AI / on-device ML, model deployment pipelines, or MLOps at scale.
- Experience with SCADA, telemetry, or control systems integration.
- Prior role at an early-stage startup and comfort operating with ambiguity.
How You Work
- You default to clarity — in writing, in diagrams, and in conversations.
- You make decisions with incomplete information, and revisit them when the data changes.
- You care about the craft — not just whether it ships, but whether it will still make sense in two years.
- You are comfortable zooming from a Kubernetes manifest to a board-level slide in the same afternoon.
- You raise the level of everyone around you.
What We Offer
- A founding-team-level seat at a Rainmatter-backed cleantech company solving problems that matter.
- Full ownership of the technical blueprint — your architecture, your bar.
- Competitive compensation with meaningful ESOPs.
- A small, high-trust team and a short distance between a good idea and a shipped product.
- Exposure to real-world deployments across water, agriculture, and power.
