About Us:
Connected Water is the decision interface for water operations: an AI-native, hardware-agnostic platform that turns a utility's siloed data into decisions and work, fast and traceable. Most utilities cannot operationalize the data they already collect, and the tools that promise to help are expensive, slow, and deliver dashboards where operators need answers. Connected Water integrates a utility's existing systems (metering, GIS, customer information, SCADA, acoustic sensors, hydraulic models) in weeks, cleans and joins the data, flags issues, routes work, and answers operational questions (non-revenue water, pressure, demand, assets, scenarios) in plain English, grounded in physics and backed by an audit trail.
Early results: a 40% reduction in non-revenue water and a 53% reduction in false-positive leak alerts at pilot partners, with freshwater and wastewater pilots underway. The company is raising a $1.75M seed round to reach platform v1.0, its first paying customers, and its first strategic channel partnerships.
About the Role:
We're hiring a Founding Engineer to help take Connected Water from a validated alpha to a product utilities can run on. This is a hands-on, full-time, embedded role: you write code most of your week, ship the features and platform hardening that get us to v1.0 and our first paying customers, and work directly alongside the founding team.
The starting point is real, not a blank page: a working prototype has produced genuine pilot results. The job is to help turn that into something that onboards a new utility in weeks, not months — cleaning up what should carry forward, rebuilding what shouldn't, and building what's still missing.
You'll wear multiple hats. Some weeks that means heads-down building; some weeks it means sitting in on a pilot utility's call, sourcing and interviewing the next engineer, or pressure-testing a product idea against what's actually buildable. This is a founding-team-adjacent role with real equity and real influence over the technical foundation — not an executive seat, and not a narrow feature-shop job either.
What You'll Do:
Build the core platform
- 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.
Bring judgment to the build
- 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.
Push the differentiators forward
- 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.
Grow the team as we grow
- 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.
Who You Are:
- 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.
Nice to have:
- 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.
Role Details:
- Title: Founding Engineer
- Works directly with: the founding team — this role is embedded with founders day to day, not positioned in a formal executive reporting line.
- Location: Remote-first / distributed. US Central Time is ideal.
- Commitment: Full-time
- Compensation: Contract to permanent. Base salary plus meaningful equity, in line with seed-stage founding engineer norms, reflecting the founder-level risk of joining pre-Series A. Exact terms discussed directly with candidates.
- Stage: Seed. Raising $1.75M ($11M post-money cap). Near-term milestones: platform v1.0, first paying customers, strategic channel partnerships.
Contact Us!
Have we described you? Please email a resume and cover letter to feng@connected-water.com