• Seeking a Software Engineer with data science experience

About SOLVINGZERO

We're a for-purpose SaaS company built to help homes go greener with confidence, saving them money and avoiding headaches from spending tens of thousands on batteries that don't match their needs.

We use an individual's unique smart meter data to help them buy the perfect battery. We can access the smart meter data for any home in the NEM (any state or territory other than WA and NT) via a federal government-led API. We use the data to understand the home's unique consumption patterns and to simulate battery performance over 12 months. The result is that a user receives answers to help them make the right decisions about upgrading their home's electricity.

Where we are at

We have recently won a significant federal grant to work alongside a university and integrate some of their research into our platform. We are now pressing forward to build faster and test what does and doesn't work, to break even as quickly as possible. It's going to be an exciting twelve months ahead.

Part of our tech stack: our backend is built on Python and Clojure, our frontend is TypeScript, we rely heavily on GCP and use Timescale as our time series DB. There could be plans to migrate purely to TS and Python down the road, away from Clojure.

About the team

A solo founder-led team with currently two overseas developers based in New York and Ukraine. The founder has worked in startups in both Melbourne and San Francisco, from pre-seed to nine-figure-valued companies. Scaling operations, marketing, engineering and other departments.

We're hoping to craft a culture of mutual respect, genuine effort, and rewarding work that we all enjoy waking up for. Ideally, we're looking for someone who can meet once a week at our Melbourne office for in-person collaboration, but happy to WFH most of the time if that's preferred.

About the ROLE

This role will work daily with the founder to build a stable and functional web app that is optimised for user-driven analysis. We're hoping to find someone who is as excited about the future of energy as we are.

What we are looking for

We are 100% focused on sustainable revenue at the moment. We need someone who likes moving fast with large amounts of unknowns and ambiguity to help us build and test quickly. The core of this role will be going deep into the build, measure, and learn loop to inform each week of work. If you like wearing multiple hats across engineering, product management, data science and more than this is the perfect role for you.

Together, we need to focus on finding a path to sustainable commercialisation, which will drive our work. We have some cash in the bank via the grant, and now have room to test a suite of features and revenue models to see what does and does not work.

Goals

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit around cleaning our processes, analytics, architecture, data analysis, functionality, ML models and more. We need to prioritise the drivers of revenue and choose those first and foremost. This role will play a huge part in guiding that strategy and diving into the work. We are also looking to hire a UX specialist, so this role will work closely with that hire and the founder to bring your work to life. There is also scope to potentially manage an overseas contractor.

What we're looking for

Hard skills

• Sound grasp of TypeScript and Python.
• An understanding of basic data science principles, in particular classical ML models (regression, random forests, gradient boosting) applied to time series problems.
• You should be comfortable with reasoning about model accuracy on real, messy data.
• Experience with a numerical Python stack (NumPy, scikit learn, SciPy, and ideally Polars) is ideal.
• Bonus points for any exposure to energy data, physical simulation, or optimisation like linear programming.

Soft skills

• Be a strong communicator who can efficiently organise your thoughts, work, and projects to your teammates.
• Respectful honesty in communication is highly regarded!

SaLARY AND PAY

This role is open for a casual to part-time 32 hour per week position depending on your preferences.

We can offer a per-hour rate of $50 to $80, which works out to $75,000 to $115,000 per year which includes super, workers comp, etc. Compensation will be determined by experience. This is a rare opportunity to get properly paid while working for an early-stage startup.

There is naturally flexibility here and we are open to discussing what works around your expectations and work/life balance.