Founding Engineer

Roughly a third of all the food the world produces is thrown away, and after households, the kitchens that feed us in hotels, offices, hospitals and universities are among the biggest wasters of all. A single commercial kitchen can bin tens of thousands of euro of food a year without ever seeing it on a balance sheet. It is one of the largest, most solvable problems in climate today, and almost nobody can measure it.
Positive Carbon makes it measurable. Founded in Dublin in 2020, we build AI that sees what a kitchen throws away. Our sensor sits above any bin and uses computer vision, the same technology found in self-driving cars, to automatically capture the weight, volume and type of every item discarded, with no manual logging by busy kitchen staff. That turns an invisible operational habit into clear, real-time financial data: what is being wasted, what it costs, and where to stop it.
The results are real. Kitchens using Positive Carbon have cut the value of the food they waste by up to 90%, lifting gross profit by 2–8% and returning several times what they spend with us. We work with hospitality groups, universities and workplace caterers across Ireland, the UK and the DACH region
And we are still small. That is the opportunity. The people we hire now will shape the product, the culture and the company with real ownership, a direct line to the founder, and a mission where, unusually, the economics and the planet pull in exactly the same direction.
We're hiring our first in-house engineer. Until now our platform has been built with an external development partner; you'll bring it in-house, own it, and set the technical direction from here. This is a founding role in the real sense your decisions on architecture, tooling and engineering culture will stick.
Roughly a third of all the food the world produces is thrown away, and after households, the kitchens that feed us in hotels, offices, hospitals and universities are among the biggest wasters of all. A single commercial kitchen can bin tens of thousands of euro of food a year without ever seeing it on a balance sheet. It is one of the largest, most solvable problems in climate today, and almost nobody can measure it.
Positive Carbon makes it measurable. Founded in Dublin in 2020, we build AI that sees what a kitchen throws away. Our sensor sits above any bin and uses computer vision, the same technology found in self-driving cars, to automatically capture the weight, volume and type of every item discarded, with no manual logging by busy kitchen staff. That turns an invisible operational habit into clear, real-time financial data: what is being wasted, what it costs, and where to stop it.
The results are real. Kitchens using Positive Carbon have cut the value of the food they waste by up to 90%, lifting gross profit by 2–8% and returning several times what they spend with us. We work with hospitality groups, universities and workplace caterers across Ireland, the UK and the DACH region
And we are still small. That is the opportunity. The people we hire now will shape the product, the culture and the company with real ownership, a direct line to the founder, and a mission where, unusually, the economics and the planet pull in exactly the same direction.
Tasks
* Own the Positive Carbon platform end to end: the food-waste capture pipeline, the data and analytics layer, and the dashboards customers use to find and reduce wasted-food cost.
* Turn raw measurement into financial insight waste value by site, category and meal period.
* Build AI into the product as a first-class capability, not a bolt-on: agents and LLM pipelines for enrichment, reporting, anomaly detection and operational recommendations.
* Use AI aggressively in how you build. We expect a small team to ship like a much larger one.
* Stand up the engineering foundations we'll need to scale: CI/CD, observability, data quality and a sane release process.
* Transition us cleanly off the agency setup without disrupting live customers.
Requirements
* Startup or founding experience (must-have): you've worked at an early-stage company or in a founding/first-hire role and you're at home with ambiguity, ownership and a blank page.
* Strong full-stack experience across backend, frontend and data and the instinct to go deep wherever the hard problem is.
* A track record of shipping production software that real customers rely on.
* Genuine fluency with modern AI tooling you build with LLMs and agents and have opinions on where they help and where they don't.
* Pragmatism over perfection: you scope hard, ship, and iterate.
* Comfort being the technical owner when there's no one else to ask.
Benefits
* Health Insurance
* Pension
* Bike to work
* 25 Days Annual Leave
* Hybrid Work
* Computer vision, IoT/edge or data-pipeline experience.
* Experience as a founding engineer or very early hire.
* Interest in the climate and food-systems problem.
Send a short note on why this role, plus a CV or LinkedIn, or through our website. Tell us about something you built, shipped or closed not just where you worked.