Lead Software Engineer – Distributed Control Systems

About Earth

At Earth, we believe how we say farewell matters. Our mission is to transform the end-of-life experience by offering families a beautiful, sustainable alternative to cremation and burial.

Instead of traditional methods that harm the environment, our gentle, natural process transforms a body into nutrient-rich soil in just 45 days, returning life to the earth and leaving a meaningful legacy. Families can choose to receive the soil to scatter, plant, or share, while the remainder is thoughtfully donated to conservation projects that restore and heal our planet.

This process—sometimes called human composting or soil transformation—is powered by our proprietary vessel technology, which carefully recreates conditions found in nature. By balancing carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and water—while precisely controlling temperature and moisture—we're able to break bodies down gently and naturally.

First legalized in Washington State in 2019, this practice is rapidly gaining popularity nationwide. Earth is the national leader, backed by major investors, and growing fast.

The Role

We're seeking a
Lead Software Engineer
to architect and build Earth's next-generation supervisory control and orchestration platform — the software layer that ensures our soil transformation vessels operate safely, predictably, and reliably across distributed operational environments as we scale.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with both architecture ownership and significant hands-on software development responsibility. You will set technical direction, write core orchestration logic, and help establish the foundation for how Earth scales to multiple facilities.

You'll collaborate across Firmware, Hardware, and Operations to define integration boundaries and enable a coherent, observable, and resilient automation platform.

This role focuses on the distributed coordination and state-management layer of our automation stack, not firmware or PLC programming. In short, this is a software systems role at the intersection of:

• distributed systems
• embedded real-time control
• physical process automation
• and facility-scale operations

What You'll Do

In this role, you will:

• Own the software architecture and implementation of the vessel control and orchestration layer services
• Define interface contracts between firmware, supervisory services, and HMIs to ensure clarity and decoupling across system boundaries
• Develop, validate, and refine control strategies and coordination logic, with a focus on reliability and observability
• Collaborate with Hardware, Firmware, Science, and Operations to translate science and operational goals into automatable, testable control behavior
• Contribute to facility rollouts and on-site commissioning, ensuring consistent configuration and smooth startup behavior across deployments
• Mentor engineers across disciplines in distributed system design, reliability thinking, and clarity in system boundaries

About You

You're a systems-minded software engineer who excels at designing software that interacts with the physical world. You are comfortable reasoning across components, abstractions, and failure modes, and you care about making complex systems:

• clear rather than implicit
• predictable rather than surprising
• resilient rather than fragile

You build software that reduces operational burden, increases trust in automation, and supports a mission you care about.

Qualifications

Required
:

• 8+ years of experience building software for distributed systems, automation, robotics, or supervisory control
• Strong software development skills in Python or C/C++
• Strong understanding of OOP, concurrency, distributed systems concepts, and system-level thinking
• Experience implementing state machines, schedulers, orchestration workflows, or supervisory control logic
• Experience designing or collaborating with embedded or real-time system APIs (even if you did not write the firmware)
• Familiarity with real-time communication frameworks such as MQTT, AMQP, Modbus, CAN, or similar
• Understanding of fault tolerance, degraded modes, and recovery patterns
• Ability to model, simulate, or validate control behavior before deployment
• Familiarity with edge or hybrid cloud deployments (e.g. AWS, GCP, etc.)
• Experience with modern DevOps practices (e.g. CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes)
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple priorities under time constraints and ensure complete, high-quality execution
• Proven technical leader, collaborator, and communicator who can energize teams, challenge the status quo, and drive change

Preferred
:

• Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, or related field — or equivalent practical experience
• Experience in robotics fleets, manufacturing automation, bioprocess control, or warehouse orchestration
• Foundation in classical and modern control theory (e.g. feedback, state estimation, system identification, fault tolerance, etc.)
• Experience with real-time and embedded systems (e.g. PLC, microcontroller, or SBC platforms)
• Familiarity with digital twins, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and real-time simulation

Role Location & Travel Expectations

This role will require semi-regular travel to the Seattle area in order to enable effective, regular in-person collaboration within our R&D facility. Travel to other facility locations around the United States may be required on an as-needed basis for facility and vessel commissioning projects.

What Earth Provides

• Mission-driven work that makes a lasting impact
• Competitive salary and equity package
• Hybrid work environment (remote-friendly)
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) plan
• Unlimited PTO