Software Engineer (Backend & Data)

About Carnot:

Carnot was founded in 2015 with one ambition: build world-class products out of India.

Eleven years on, we’re a Mahindra-backed agri-tech company running a telematics layer that serves 2 lac+ tractors across India and processes 100M+ data points every day. That backend is solid enough to mostly run itself — which is exactly why we’re now building the next layer on top of it: satellite intelligence for agriculture, a modern CMS, AI tools for operations and aftersales and analytics on everything we collect.

We build for tractor owners, dealers, sugar mills, and fleet operators across the country.

The role:

We’re a small engineering team where everyone owns a lot and no one hides behind a job title. We’re not looking for someone to fill one narrow slot — we’re looking for an engineer who can move where the work is.

You’ll start on our Smart Harvesting Solution as a data engineer — turning satellite imagery, weather feeds, and parcel-level farm data into predictions for sugar yield and harvest detection. The data is messy on purpose: farms without clean boundaries, weather that won’t behave, satellite images 80% cloud-covered exactly when you need them clear. If that sounds fun rather than frightening, you’ll fit here.

Once you’ve found your feet, where you go next depends on you and the team. That could

mean other data pipelines and analytics on our telematics data, modernizing the CMS that powers our aftersales engine (the system behind our 70% recharge rate, and a 4.2/5 customer satisfaction score), or building new AI tools for ops.

What you’ll do:

You’ll own workflows end-to-end — data → experiments → pipelines → APIs → production.

Broadly -

• Build and maintain pipelines for satellite imagery, weather data, and parcel-level farm information
• Run Python experiments around sugar yield, harvest detection, and crop monitoring, then turn the useful ones into production pipelines, APIs, or scheduled jobs — the kind that don’t break at 2 AM
• Build modular components that serve the harvesting solution today and our broader data and platform work tomorrow

Over time, expect to pick up backend services, internal tooling, or CMS work as the team’s needs and your strengths line up.

You should apply if you have:

• 4+ years of professional experience building and shipping software in production (excluding internships — we mean actual systems running for real users)
• Strong Python, and comfort wrangling messy real-world data with Pandas / NumPy
• Working knowledge of at least one cloud platform (AWS / GCP / Azure)
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL, S3/GCS, Django/FastAPI or similar systems
• At least one recent, concrete example of something you personally took from idea to production
• The ability to learn fast and run with little hand-holding — we’re small and expect ownership from week one
• Real startup experience, and the temperament that comes with it

Nice to have:

• Any geospatial or remote-sensing work (GeoPandas, rasterio, GDAL, PostGIS)
• Experience with weather, time-series, or agronomic data
• Comfort using AI coding tools (Claude, Cursor, Codex) in your daily workflow — we use these heavily, primarily Claude

Culture:

We're a small engineering team with no hard sub-teams, where a handful of people quietly run systems that touch a million tractors. There's no layer between you and real impact: what you build ships, reaches farmers and operators across India, and you see it work. People join us solid and leave exceptional, and we're proud of that track record.

We move fast, ship over polish, and back each other when things break. If you want to do the best, most ownership-heavy work of your career so far alongside people who care deeply about the craft, you'll feel at home here.