Senior Software Engineer (Control Plane)

Posted Oct 16

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’s ability to achieve its mission is determined by our ability to work together — as defined by our core values: Transparency, Collaboration, Operational Excellence, Ownership, and Empathy. We seek individuals who embody these values, as they are instrumental in ensuring our team consistently delivers excellence and fosters an engaging and supportive culture

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, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Singapore, and India.

Who You Are

We are looking for a driven Software Engineer (Backend) to lay the technical foundation of our Control Plane team, to establish services, APIs, contracts and processes to control our customer serving core systems.

You are bold and creative, and have deep empathy for customers and users. 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.

You are curious and like to understand technologies and their tradeoffs in depth - providing technical guidance to the team and peers as and when required. Leading by example, you have accumulated a wealth of insights and experiences from your hands-on involvement in the field, and you are committed to rolling up your sleeves and getting work done. You like joining and supporting other engineers in their work to learn from them as well as letting them benefit from your expertise and experience.

You have the motivation and skills to identify technical product needs, initiate projects and owning their delivery, including the involvement of engineering peers as needed. You are comfortable with challenging the status quo respectfully to drive and deliver technical excellence in the team.

*We are seeking a team member located within one of the following areas: USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Italy, or Portugal.

  • In the United States, we accept applicants located in the following states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington. 
  • In Canada, we accept applicants located in the following provinces: Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta.

UK-based candidates may have personal data shared with UK Visas & Immigration.

Please note that this role's start date would be January 2025. 

Responsibilities

The Control Plane team you are kicking off will be responsible for providing services, APIs and processes to orchestrate our core customer serving products. You will take ownership, work hands-on and provide technical guidance to the team and relevant stakeholders on the design, implementation and technical planning of the control plane. You will shape this new team and its deliverables from the very beginning as an experienced engineer with a focus on backend solutions.

As an organization, we strongly believe in expertise across the stack. As such, you will have opportunities to contribute on a broad range of topics including Distributed Systems, MLOps and DevOps.

In particular, you will:

  • Design, build and lead the engineering initiatives and technical vision for a new Control Plane team to ensure excellence on usability, orchestration, integration and operations on services allowing internal users and other services to trigger changes and actions on our data processing and AI workloads serving customers in production.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.

In your first 60 days…

  • You will get a solid understanding of what Phaidra does and how we do it.
  • You will meet with team members across Phaidra and started building relationships that will help you be successful at your job.
  • You will complete the onboarding exercise and will be on your way to completing your first production task.
  • You will take ownership for the Control Plane work within an existing team, identify gaps and propose roadmap items on the topic.

In your first 90 days…

  • You will be fully integrated in the team and with team members across the company.
  • You will have a more in-depth understanding of our system architecture and infrastructure.
  • You will complete your first on-call experience helping monitor and improve our production environments.
  • You will become an expert with our tooling.
  • You will start to contribute to knowledge sharing throughout Phaidra and the team.
  • You will take proactively drive control plane topics and represent it technically throughout the company, as well as informing the formation of a dedicated team around the topic.

Key Qualifications

  • 6+ years of work experience.
  • Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
  • Strong experience on designing and implementing services, APIs and backend solutions
  • 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.
  • Strong expertise in Python and Cloud environments
  • Ability to collaborate and communicate effectively in an all-remote setting
  • Doing your work with curiosity, ownership, transparency & directness, outcome orientation, and customer empathy.

Bonus

  • Experience on building a control plane on top of a realtime production system
  • Experience with building applications that can be deployed in cloud, hybrid or on prem environments
  • Experience with or exposure to Machine Learning systems
  • Experience with leading formation of a new team and owned services from a technical perspective

Relevant Technologies from our Stack

  • Python, Go
  • PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning
  • Ray.io, Prefect, mlflow
  • REST & gRPC micro-services
  • Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform & Kapitan
  • GCP - GKE, PubSub, CloudSQL, BigTable, etc.
  • Postgres, MongoDB, Parquet, etc.
  • Grafana Cloud, Prometheus
  • Poetry, Pants
  • Gitlab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis

General Interview Process

All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required.

  1. Meeting with Operations (30 minutes): The purpose of this interview is to meet you, learn more about your background, discuss what you are looking for in a new position and cover formalities around your application.
  2. Hiring Manager interview (30 minutes): This is an introduction call with the hiring manager so that the candidate and the hiring manager can get to know each other better. It will mainly focus on your previous experience and technical background. This meeting is also meant to enable you to ask any questions about the team & role.
  3. Technical Interview 1 (45 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.
  4. Technical Interview 2 (90 minutes): In this interview, we will go over a system design problem. You can expect to draw architecture diagrams using boxes & arrows in your browser. We will talk about system design, scalability and monitoring.
  5. Culture fit interview with Phaidra’s co-founders (30 minutes): This interview focuses on alignment with Phaidra’s values and the mutual cultural fit.

Base Salary

  • US Residents:$114,400-$206,400/year
  • UK Residents: £93,600-£140,400/year
  • Canada Residents: CA$140,000-CA$210,000/year

Salary ranges for other countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Ireland) will vary based on the market rate for the location.

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 had all-company summits 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.

#LI-Remote

WE DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM RECRUITERS.