Senior Software Engineer (Tech Lead, Data Platform) - Phaidra
San Francisco, CA
About the Job
About Phaidra
Phaidra is building the future of industrial automation.
The world today is filled with static, monolithic infrastructure. Factories, power plants, buildings, etc. operate the same they've operated for decades — because the controls programming is hard-coded. Thousands of lines of rules and heuristics that define how the machines interact with each other. The result of all this hard-coding is that facilities are frozen in time, unable to adapt to their environment while their performance slowly degrades.
Phaidra creates AI-powered control systems for the industrial sector, enabling industrial facilities to automatically learn and improve over time. Specifically:
- We use reinforcement learning algorithms to provide this intelligence, converting raw sensor data into high-value actions and decisions.
- We focus on industrial applications, which tend to be well-sensorized with measurable KPIs — perfect for reinforcement learning.
- We enable domain experts (our users) to configure the AI control systems (i.e. agents) without writing code. They define what they want their AI agents to do, and we do it for them.
Our team has a track record of applying AI to some of the toughest problems. From achieving superhuman performance with DeepMind's AlphaGo, to reducing the energy required to cool Google's Data Centers by 40%, we deeply understand AI and how to apply it in production for massive impact.
Phaidra is based in the USA but 100% remote; we do not have a physical office. We hire employees internationally with the help of our partner, OysterHR. Our team is currently located throughout the USA, Canada, UK, Norway, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and India.
**Please only apply to one opening. If you are a better fit for another opening, our team will move your application. Candidates who apply to multiple openings will not be considered.**
Who You Are
We are looking for a driven Software Engineer (Backend) to be a part of our growing Data Platform team. You are bold and creative, and have deep empathy for customers who may not be tech-savvy. You will design and implement significant parts of the code base and will have the opportunity to make an immediate impact with your work and guide the product and team as we grow.
The Data platform team at Phaidra is responsible for -
- Building streaming & batch components that power both realtime & historical data ingestion & processing
- Building and optimising the data and feature stores
- Building high-throughput and highly-available multi-modal APIs used throughout the organization, from agent training, to realtime inference to user facing applications.
- Building the central orchestration & metadata layer, and APIs of the core Platform.
- Building services to fetch and store external third party data (ex. weather forecasts) required for AI training.
**We are seeking a team member located within one of the following areas: USA/Canada/UK/EU
Responsibilities
As an organization, we strongly believe in expertise across the stack. As such, you will experience flavors of Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, MLOps and DevOps. As a Software Engineer(Tech Lead, Data Platform) you will play a Tech Lead role in the Data platform team and in particular:
- Build and design scalable components for the Data platform to allow high throughput data ingestion & data processing, which feeds the data into agents doing realtime inference for autonomous control of industrial systems.
- Design and develop systems to store and serve batch data for agent training or analytics.
- Contribute to the design and implementation of the product backend by writing REST & gRPC API services and scalable event-driven backend applications.
- Design clear, extensible software interfaces for the team's customers and maintain a high release quality bar.
- Design and optimize data storage & retrieval mechanisms for high throughput, security & ease of access.
- Perform DevOps duties of CI/CD, Release & Deployment management.
- Be a part of our global production oncall team and, own & operate your services in production, meeting Phaidra's high bar for operational excellence.
- Lead cross-functional initiatives and collaborating with engineers, product managers and TPM across teams.
- Mentor your peers and be a technical role-model in the team.
Onboarding
In your first 30 days...
- You will be immersed in an onboarding program that introduces you to Phaidra and our product.
- You will spend time in the Engineering org, learning how the teams operate, interact, and approach problems.
- You will read various parts of our handbook and familiarize yourself with the documentation culture at Phaidra.
- You will set up your development environment and start working on an onboarding exercise that will introduce you to various parts of our code base.
- You will learn about how we use agile and be able to navigate our sprint boards and backlogs.
- You will learn about various team standards and development & release processes.
- You will start to learn about our system architecture and infrastructure.
- You will start picking up few good "first-tasks" to get yourself accustomed to the end to end release flow.
By your first 60 days...
- You will have a solid understanding of what Phaidra does and how we do it.
- You will have met with team members across Phaidra and started building relationships that will help you be successful at your job.
- You will have completed the onboarding exercise and will be on your way to completing your first production task.
By your first 90 days...
- You will have been fully integrated in the team and with team members across the company.
- You will get a more in-depth understanding of our system architecture and infrastructure.
- You will have completed your first on-call experience helping monitor and improve our production environments.
- You will have become an expert with our tooling.
- You will have started to contribute to knowledge sharing throughout Phaidra.
Key Qualifications
- 7+ years of work experience.
- Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
- Expertise with production Software Engineering - relational and non-relational data modeling, micro-services, understanding of event driven systems, etc.
- Strong experience building large scale multi-tenant systems with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning, monitoring, and statistics/metrics collection.
- Exposure to distributed data processing in python using frameworks like Spark, Pandas, Ray, Modin or Dask.
- Experience as a service owner of a realtime production system - operating & monitoring services in production, including using observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo or equivalent offerings and incident management.
- Share our company values: curiosity, ownership, transparency & directness, outcome-based performance, and customer empathy.
- Experience with building applications that can be deployed in cloud, hybrid or on-prem environments.
- Experience with latest batch & realtime data processing, storage & service technologies.
Bonus
- Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies like Docker & Kubernetes.
- Experience with configuring cloud infrastructure using configuration management tools like Terraform or Jssonet, Kapitan, Helm, etc.
- Experience with building high scale DataLake/Lakehouse.
Our Stack
- Languages - (Backend) Python, Go; (Frontend) JavaScript/TypeScript, React; Customer SDK & Clients - C# .NET
- PyTorch
- Cypress
- Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform & Kapitan
- Gitlab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis, Vercel
- GCP - GKE, PubSub, CloudSQL, BigTable, Postgres, etc.
- Ray.io
- REST & gRPC micro-services
- Poetry, Pantsbuild
General Interview Process
All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required.
- Initial screening interview with a People Operations team member (30 minutes): The purpose of this interview is to meet you, learn more about your background, and discuss what you are looking for in a new position.
- Hiring manager interview (30 minutes): The purpose of this meeting is for you to get to know the manager for the role. This chat will mainly focus on your previous experience and technical background. You can expect to talk about projects that you have worked on in the past and ask any questions about the team & role.
- Technical Interview 1 (75 minutes): The purpose of this interview is to assess your skills in data structures/ algorithms and problem solving. This interview will involve live coding exercises.
- Technical Interview 2 (90 minutes): The purpose of this interview is to assess your skills in system design and SRE. This interview will involve a system design question for which you will sketch an architecture.
- Meeting with VP of Engineering (30 minutes): This interview is a combination of technical and cultural fit assessment. You will cover the technical experience and the skills that you bring and have an opportunity to ask any questions about the team's culture or vision.
- Culture fit interview with Phaidra's co-founders (30 minutes): This interview focuses on alignment with Phaidra's values
Base Salary
US Residents: $114,400-$206,400/year
UK Residents: £94,400-£141,600/year
This position will also include equity.
These are best faith estimates of the base salary range for this position. Multiple factors such as experience, education, level, and location are taken into account when determining compensation.
Benefits & Perks
- Fast-paced and team-oriented environment where you will be instrumental in the direction of the company.
- Phaidra is a 100% remote company with a digital nomad policy.
- Competitive compensation & equity.
- Outsized responsibilities & professional development.
- Training is foundational; functional, customer immersion, and development training.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (exact benefits vary by region).
- Unlimited paid time off, with a minimum of 20 days off per year requirement.
- Paid parental leave (exact benefits vary by region).
- Home office setup allowance, coworking space stipend, and company MacBook.
*Please note that Phaidra's benefits and perks listed above do not apply to temporary employees such as interns.
On being Remote
We are thoughtful about remote collaboration. We look to the pioneers - like Gitlab - for inspiration and best practices to create a stellar remote work environment. We have a documentation-first culture and actively practice asynchronous communication in everything we do. Our team stays connected through tools like Slack and video chat. Most teams meet daily, and we have dedicated all-hands meetings weekly to build strong relationships. We hold virtual team building events once per quarter - and even hold virtual socials to watch rocket launches! We have a yearly in-person, all-company summit in locations like Seattle, Athens, Goa, and Barcelona.
Equal Opportunity Employment
Phaidra is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Phaidra is governed on the basis of merit, competence, and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status. We welcome diversity and strive to maintain an inclusive environment for all employees. If you need assistance with completing the application process, please contact us at hiring@phaidra.ai.
E-Verify Notice
Phaidra participates in E-Verify, an employment authorization database provided through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA). As required by law, we will provide the SSA and, if necessary, the DHS, with information from each new employee's Form I-9 to confirm work authorization for those residing in the United States.
Additional information about E-Verify can be found here.
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WE DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM RECRUITERS.