About Sesame Sustainability

At Sesame Sustainability we are developing simulation, optimization, and analysis software to democratize and accelerate cost-optimal decarbonization across heavy industry (responsible for over 40% of global emissions). Borne from research at the MIT Energy Initiative, our technology stack is tried, tested, and trusted by some of the largest players in energy and environment.

A growing team, we are hiring a lead front end engineer to join us on our mission to squash industrial emissions. Come work with us!

About the Role

Sesame Sustainability’s lead front end engineer will be responsible for implementing and testing our user interface, which is a web application. You will work with a stellar senior backend engineer who has coded most of the application during the academic development and has now joined us full time, as well as MIT engineers with deep expertise in energy systems and optimization. As a small team, your input will be at the forefront of the company’s efforts to provide users in industrial companies with a fast, responsive, and intuitive interface.

Together, we will ensure that our clients can easily perform complex life cycle and techno-economic analyses, uncovering ways to decarbonize the polluting processes of their company in the most efficient and cost effective way. To do so, we will focus on providing very effective visualizations of calculation results. These visualizations will be laid out on an intuitive dashboard, which will contain graphs and maps. Having a good understanding of data visualization principles would greatly help in conveying results to the users, notably through a grasp of information hierarchy. Our current front end tech stack relies on React, which we plan to continue using but keeping up with state of the art frameworks and having a thorough grasp of front end languages is beneficial to adequately analyze the tradeoffs and make technical decisions.

As an early addition to the team, you will deeply influence and shape the technical workflow and implementation of our solution. You will experience a lot of freedom around the direction and undertaking of your work, and we will be looking to you as the expert in building the solution our users will interact with. As we grow, you will continue to have several opportunities for both technical and leadership development.

You will love this job if you…

• Have a strong sense of ownership over your work and expect the same from your team,
• Are able to quickly translate business needs into valuable features, while minimizing development efforts required,
• Love working very collaboratively with a team, contributing to our work with your expertise and teaching us a few things along the way to enable us to better work with you,
• Can seamlessly work with designers, understanding their language and quickly translating any documents they may produce into code,
• Are excited by the technical challenges that come with providing a seamless experience to users, notably regarding performance when rendering a lot of data,
• Can embrace the challenges of minimal supervision and autonomy,
• Are eager to understand the full stack, working with software developers all along the product.

Key Responsibilities

• Creating best in class UX/UI experiences and being able to roll custom styling, components, building libraries, extending libraries, etc.
• Delivering engaging prototypes using the latest frontend technologies.
• Understanding business requirements and user needs to propose innovative solutions.
• Develop intuitive visualizations in the form of graphs or maps that lay out results in a digestible way.
• Develop best practices regarding workflow within the team, establishing a methodology that will increase developers’ productivity.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• A few years of experience building scalable, reactive applications with product teams, working through iterations and refactoring.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, and relentless, unsupervised prioritization ability to meet deadlines.
• Thorough knowledge of front end technologies and languages.

Desired Qualifications

• Knowledge of python and postgres to ease collaboration with the backend development.
• Deep data visualization knowledge.

Benefits

• Salary ranging between $110-160k based on experience, plus a strong equity package
• Subsidized health and dental insurance
• Unlimited vacation policy, mental health personal days, and generous sick leave

Note: while we would prefer someone in person, we could consider this position as remote depending on your qualifications.