Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

Department: Technology

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Denver Headquarters

Compensation: $150,000 - $185,000 / year

Description

Project Canary is a climate technology company offering an enterprise data platform that helps energy companies improve and report on their emissions footprint. Project Canary builds high-fidelity sensors, ingests data from various other technologies and sources, and leverages proprietary analytics and models to deliver insights that operators can act on to reduce emissions. The data-driven technology enables energy operators to stop leaks faster, reduce risk, streamline reporting, and differentiate their operations for key stakeholders.

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer who enjoys solving hard technical problems, working across the full stack, and taking meaningful ownership in a growing company. This role leans toward backend engineering, but we expect our engineers to be comfortable contributing wherever the product needs them.

This is a hybrid role based in downtown Denver, Colorado. We value in-person collaboration and build best when engineers spend meaningful time working side by side, whiteboarding, prototyping, and iterating together.

What You'll Work On

• Own and improve meaningful production systems
• Design, build, and maintain production applications across backend services and web interfaces
• Take on complex backend problems while remaining comfortable contributing across the full stack
• Solve for reliability, maintainability, performance, and evolving product needs
• Contribute to technical and architectural decisions within the team
• Partner closely with product, engineering, and company leadership
• Work in fast feedback loops with relatively few layers between an idea and implementation
• Build software with visible impact on our products, customers, and company

What "Senior" Means Here

• Make sound technical decisions and clearly explain the tradeoffs behind them
• Work effectively through ambiguity and turn unclear problems into actionable solutions
• Independently own complex technical work from problem definition through delivery
• Deliver reliably and adjust execution based on business priorities
• Contribute meaningfully to architecture, technical decisions, and engineering practices
• Improve the quality of the systems and code around them
• Contribute to a culture of curiosity, accountability, and momentum
• Senior Engineers here are strong individual contributors who are expected to bring judgment, initiative, and technical depth to the problems they own.

What We're Looking For

Technical Depth and Rigor

You have demonstrated the ability to reason through complex systems and make sound engineering decisions. That evidence might come from:

• Designing and shipping production systems
• Building products from 0 to 1 in ambiguous environments
• Working across different systems, technologies, or problem domains
• Research, open-source contributions, or other technically rigorous work
• Solving problems that required thoughtful system design, tradeoff analysis, or non-obvious technical decisions
• Developing and maintaining production web applications and services

Our Stack

Our application stack is primarily .NET, C#, Entity Framework Core, and React. This is a full-stack role with a backend lean.

We're especially interested in engineers who:

• Have strong backend fundamentals and are comfortable contributing to frontend work
• Can transfer experience from Java, Spring Boot, or comparable technologies into our .NET environment
• Get productive quickly in unfamiliar technologies
• Take ownership of learning rather than waiting for formal training

You do not need deep experience in every part of our stack on day one. We care more about the strength of your engineering fundamentals, how quickly you learn, and how you approach unfamiliar problems.

How We Use AI

We expect engineers to use AI and other development tools where they improve speed, learning, and productivity.

At the same time, you should be able to:

• Understand and explain the code you ship
• Evaluate technical and architectural decisions independently
• Review generated code critically
• Identify bugs and troubleshoot without relying on the tool to do the reasoning for you
• Recognize when a generated solution is wrong, overly complex, or simply not a good fit for the problem

We value engineers who can reason from first principles when needed rather than relying solely on established patterns or generated solutions.

We care more about how you think, learn, and build than whether your background follows a traditional path.

Breadth and Curiosity

We are especially drawn to engineers who have developed range over the course of their careers and can bring lessons from different technologies, systems, and problem spaces to new challenges.

Strong candidates:

• Have expanded their scope through new systems, domains, technologies, or increased responsibility
• Are comfortable stepping outside their primary area of expertise when the problem requires it
• Learn unfamiliar systems and domain concepts quickly
• Connect product needs, customer impact, and technical design
• Bring ideas and patterns from previous experiences without assuming every past solution fits the current problem

Depth matters, but so does the ability to apply experience across different kinds of problems.

Startup Adaptability

We are a mid-stage startup. Priorities evolve. Documentation is not always perfect. Sometimes the best path forward is not immediately obvious.

We are drawn to engineers who:

• Thrive in environments with evolving structure
• Take ownership of learning new systems and domains
• Proactively identify next steps rather than waiting for assignments
• Are comfortable on small teams where engineers contribute broadly and step in where needed to get work shipped
• Stay anchored to business goals, not just technical elegance

Ownership, Pace, and Judgment

Strong candidates demonstrate:

• Clear reasoning behind technical and architectural decisions
• Ability to articulate tradeoffs, not just best practices
• Awareness of business context when estimating timelines and choosing solutions
• The discipline to meet commitments
• The judgment to increase intensity when the situation calls for it and simplify when complexity is not justified

We value engineers who understand that great software supports real business outcomes.

Experience That Is Particularly Relevant, Not Required

Exposure to complex or real-world data problems is compelling, including:

• Systems interacting with physical processes
• Geospatial or spatial data
• Combining multiple data streams to infer meaningful signals
• Problems requiring modeling, interpretation, or non-obvious conclusions
• Production applications built with .NET/C#, Java/Spring Boot, React, or comparable technologies

Strength in some areas can compensate for gaps in others.

Benefits

• Salary range: $150,000-$185,000 annual base

• Hybrid work environment (3 days/week in Denver office)

• Health, dental, and vision insurance with low deductibles and premiums paid by company 99% for self and 50% for dependents and/or spouse

• 401K with company match (no vesting period)

• Student loan assistance

• Generous culture around time off, including:

• Unlimited PTO

• 6 days of sick time per year

• 11 paid company holidays per year

• Up to 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave

• Dog friendly office environment