Senior Software Engineer

Build the ESG Operating System of the future and own the technology of an ESMA-licensed rating agency. Be part of the Executive team with equity

Ecomate is a European ESG rating agency and the first ESG Operating System: a self-service SaaS and PaaS suite that lets any company integrate, manage, and report sustainability — or monitor the ESG performance of the businesses it works with. We are an ESG rating provider under Regulation (EU) 2024⁄3005, supervised by ESMA, accredited by Accredia under ISO/IEC 17029, and built in Europe for European companies across every EU framework (CSRD, ESRS, Taxonomy, SFDR, CSDDD). Our roadmap spans thirty-plus interconnected products — from a two-hour SME rating to unsolicited ESG risk scores on millions of companies, a white-label platform, an API, and an “open-ESG” scientific committee.

Initial requirements (please do not continue if you do not read yourself in these criteria)

• Located in Milan or willing to relocate (80% ON SITE, 20% REMOTE)
• Super fluent in Italian and sufficiently fluent in English
• Wanting to work for equity as much as in the fixed salary

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT (please do not continue if you read yourself in one of these criteria)

• If your instinct is to solve problems by hiring, this isn’t the fit. We want leverage, not headcount.
• You see yourself as a pure manager and you do not want to get your hands dirty.
• You see yourself as a 9 to 5 employee

We are small by design. We intend to stay that way while building something very large…

That makes this an unusual Senior Software Engineer / CTO role. You will hold two disciplines at once that most technology leaders only ever hold one of. On one side, a regulated, deterministic core: ratings that must be reproducible, versioned, auditable, and defensible to a supervisor. On the other, an aggressively AI-native product layer: agents, copilots, and intelligence products that reward speed and breadth. The whole architecture rests on keeping those two planes separate and connecting them through a single, controlled gate. You will be the person who understands why that line exists and never lets it blur.

Your job is to design the system in which humans and agents together produce far more than a conventional team, while keeping the quality a regulated codebase demands.

And you will lead a team that isn’t only human. You’ll orchestrate people on-site, remote, and contract — alongside AI agents that write code, review it, test it, and operate the platform. Directing that hybrid workforce well is the central skill of this job, not a side feature of it.

Soft skills:

• Capable of handling the typical startup company style and pressure
• Great communication skills (must be able to function very well in a team)
• Open minded with deep interest for technology and its experimentation
• Capable of communicating with the company’s stakeholders (all stakeholders)
• Great project management skills

Previous experience:

• Proven experience of architecting and shipping production platforms — ideally data-intensive, multi-tenant B2B SaaS — and of making them scale.
• Experience with Agile (Kanban, scrum) youtrack, Jira or other PM tools
• Real experience in a regulated or high-trust domain (financial services, fintech, insurance, healthtech, or similar), where reproducibility, audit trails, and supervisory scrutiny were part of the job. You understand why determinism and traceability are non-negotiable, not obstacles.
• Deep, current fluency in AI-native engineering: LLM-based products, agent orchestration, RAG, evals and guardrails and daily, personal use of AI coding agents. You’ve built with these tools, not just read about them.
• Strong data-platform experience: pipelines, entity resolution, lakehouse architectures, and provenance and lineage at scale.
• The ability to lead a small senior team with clarity, to run distributed, hybrid, and contract collaborators well, and the judgment to extend that leadership to AI agents.
• Security and privacy literacy fit for a regulated EU company: GDPR, data residency, secure architecture.
• Product sense: you make technology decisions in service of what the business is trying to become, and you can explain them to a board, a regulator, and an engineer.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias to ship in phases. You’d rather prove a slice end-to-end than design everything on paper.
• Deliver methodology-as-code: versioned, immutable, tested rule sets with full lineage from input to score, meeting ESMA’s expectations on methodology versioning, material change, and auditability.
• Build for reproducibility — event-sourced audit trails, pinned methodology and data versions, human analyst sign-off
• Run a model-agnostic strategy: routing, tiering, and the ability to swap or self-host models, including European ones, as the landscape shifts.
• Composable platform of shared rails (identity, entitlements, data, AI gateway, billing, events) on which thirty products run as modules, so interconnection and cross-sell fall out of the design rather than being bolted on.
• Keep the platform portable and sovereign: open formats, open standards, EU data residency, and no lock-in
• Own AI governance: risk classification per product, technical documentation, monitoring, and transparency obligations under the EU AI Act.
• Build the data engine behind with ingestions from external APIs, official EU registries and OSINT sources, entity resolution across countries, a data lakehouse and provenance on every data point.
• Run security as the public face of a regulated agency demands: server-enforced data gating, edge protection, hardened surfaces, and a path to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 on top of our existing accreditation.
• Design for GDPR, data residency, and lawful, licensed data sourcing with recorded provenance.
• Be a real partner to product: translate the ESG OS vision into a phased build, protect the team from building everything at once, and keep the roadmap honest about sequencing.
• Acquiring the industry know-how to understand what gets delegated and what’s owned, building the agent-augmented engineering system itself by staying hands-on.

Technical Requirements

• Programmatic SEO and large-scale content platforms, credentials
• Experience exposing products via APIs and platforms (PaaS, white-label, MCP).
• Old web stacks for handling migration from previous architecture: PHP 5 -8 , python, JS vanilla
• Modern web stack like nodeJs, TypeScript, Next.js, Python for AI, data, and ingestion; PostgreSQL a lakehouse on open table formats and columnar engine for analytics at scale;
• Infrastructure experience on Google Cloud Platform, terraform or portable, sovereignty-conscious posture; LangGraph/ADK-class orchestration behind a model-agnostic gateway; durable workflows; open-source tooling.
• Database stack: Redis, DB No SQL (Elasticsearch, MongoDB, cassandra), Kafka, Mqtt, Workflow processor (ni-fi,n8n or others)
• Microservices architectures, Async , event-driven, cyber patterns and scalability patterns, automated testing, API Gateway, CI/CD and Quality gates

A great plus would be having:

• Familiarity with the EU regulatory landscape we live in: the ESG Ratings Regulation, the AI Act, CSRD/ESRS, GDPR.
• Experience with sovereign or open-source-first infrastructure in Europe.
• Background in ESG, sustainability data, or rating and scoring systems.

We would like to find a committed and truly pro-active person that will take on this project passionately, accepting the challenge not only from a professional point of view but also by embracing our cause to add beauty in the European enterprises.

Benefits

• 24⁄7 access to our office located at the 12th floor in the heart of Milan’s financial district
• Unlimited hardware (we’ll get you any laptop, monitor, mouse, phone, cables you need…)
• Stock options
• Fees on partnership leads
• Ticket restaurant (buoni pasto)
• Ticket gasoline (buoni carburante)
• Mobility bonus for purchasing smart vehicles
• Superb discounts from our partners for extra services
• Company meals, trips, coffees and many other perks and rewards

It may take up to 30 minutes to complete our application form.