Senior Software Engineer

Position: Software Developer (Path to Executive / CTO)

Location: Milan, Italy (75% ON SITE , 25% REMOTE for the first 2 years)

Package: Salary + Equity + Stock Options

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT

• Not a "scale by headcount" environment: We solve complexity with architectural leverage and AI tooling, not by bloated teams.
• Not a pure manager position: If you do not want to write code, review PRs, and get your hands dirty, this is not the right fit.

Build the ESG Operating System of the future and own the technology of an ESMA-licensed rating agency.

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.

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

The Challenge & The Role

This is an unusual executive engineering role. You will balance two distinct planes:

• A Regulated, Deterministic Core: Auditable, versioned, reproducible rating methodologies defensible to ESMA and financial supervisors.
• An AI-Native Product Layer: Fast, broad, agentic workflows, copilots, and intelligent pipelines.

Your mission is to keep these two planes cleanly separated yet connected through a secure gate, while orchestrating a hybrid engineering model composed of core developers, contractors, and production-grade AI coding agents.

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.

• 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)

Key Responsibilities

• Architecture & Methodology-as-Code: Design deterministic, event-sourced audit trails and pinned methodology pipelines meeting strict ESMA auditability standards.
• AI-Native Engineering & Governance: Implement model-agnostic gateway routing (LLMs, RAG, agents) while ensuring EU AI Act technical compliance and risk classification.
• Data Platform Ownership: Architect data lakehouse pipelines, entity resolution engines, and ingestion workflows from global registries and OSINT sources.
• Platform Security & Sovereignty: Maintain EU data residency, GDPR compliance, and hard edge security targeting ISO 27001 / SOC 2 standards.
• Legacy Migration: Lead the gradual, pragmatic transition from existing legacy services to our modern event-driven stack.

Requirements & Stack

Core Requirements:

• Proven track record architecting and scaling data-intensive, multi-tenant B2B SaaS or PaaS products.
• Hands-on experience in regulated or high-trust domains (Fintech, Healthtech, Insurtech, or Compliance) where auditability and determinism are mandatory.
• Active, daily usage of AI-native engineering tools (agentic orchestration, RAG, LLM evaluations, coding copilots).
• Expertise in distributed systems, event-driven microservices, modern data architectures, and strict security posture.

Target Stack:

• Modern Core: TypeScript / Node.js, Python (AI & Data Ingestion), Go / Rust (where performance demands).
• Legacy Context: Familiarity with PHP (5/8) to oversee seamless migration to the modern platform.

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.

• 24/7 access to our office located at the 1