Senior Software Engineer (Data Platform) at Phaidra

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 we are 100% remote with no physical office. We hire employees internationally with the help of our partner, OysterHR. Our team is currently located throughout the USA, Canada, UK, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, and India. Who You Are We're looking for an experienced Software Engineer to anchor the technical direction of our growing Data Platform team. You'll drive architecture decisions for distributed, multi-tenant systems and raise the bar for the engineers around you. You are bold, creative, and have deep empathy for customers. You will design and implement significant parts of the codebase, make an immediate impact with your work, and help guide the product and team as we grow. The Data Platform team at Phaidra is responsible for: • Building streaming and batch components for real-time and historical data ingestion and processing. • Building and optimizing the data and feature stores. • Building high-throughput and highly available APIs used throughout the organization. • Building the central orchestration and metadata layer, along with the APIs of the core Platform. Responsibilities You'll own the systems every other team at Phaidra depends on for ingestion, storage, serving, and orchestration. As our customer base grows rapidly, this role is about scaling those systems and the processes around them to meet that growth, with multi-tenancy and self-serve tooling as core priorities. Concretely, that means you'll: • Design and build scalable components for the data platform that enable high-throughput data ingestion and processing. • Design and develop systems to store and serve batch data for analytics. • Contribute to the design and implementation of API services and scalable event-driven applications that power the product backend. • Design clear, extensible software interfaces for internal consumers and maintain a high release-quality bar. • Design and optimize data storage and retrieval mechanisms for high throughput, security, and ease of access. • Own and operate your services in production, including releases, deployments, and on-call rotations, meeting Phaidra's high bar for operational excellence. • Lead cross-functional initiatives collaborating with engineers, product managers, and TPMs across teams. • Mentor your peers and be a technical role model on the team. Key Qualifications • 7+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent on distributed or data-intensive systems. • Strong experience designing and implementing distributed systems for data ingestion, storage, and processing. • Proven expertise building, operating, and monitoring large-scale multi-tenant systems while accounting for high availability, fault tolerance, and performance. • Ability to take ownership of realtime production systems - aligning technical with business requirements, raising the bar for operational excellence and on-call incident handling • Ability to collaborate and communicate effectively in an all-remote setting. • Approach your work with curiosity, ownership, transparency, directness, outcome orientation, and customer empathy. • Experience with latest batch & realtime data processing, storage & service technologies such as Apache Flink. Preferred Experience • Hands-on experience designing environment-agnostic abstractions that let applications run across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem deployments, with working knowledge of containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes. • Experience with self-service data platforms, data lakes, or lakehouses at scale. Our Stack • Python, Go • Ray.io • REST & gRPC micro-services • Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform & Kapitan • GCP - GKE, PubSub, CloudSQL, BigTable, Postgres, MongoDB, BigQuery etc. • Grafana Cloud, Prometheus • Pants • Gitlab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis 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. • You will have identified areas of improvement in the data platform and started thinking towards them while working with the team. 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. • Be a distributed systems expert in the company, drive discussions on important topics and present them in the learning sessions. General Interview Process All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required. • All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required. • 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. • 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. • Data Structures & Algorithms Technical Interview (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. • System Design Technical Interview (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. • 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: • Tier 1 (Largest highest-cost metros): $145,600 - $200,200 • Tier 2 (Other major metros): $138,320 - $190,190 • Tier 3 (Mid-sized metro areas): $131,040 - $180,180 • Tier 4 (All other locations): $123,760 - $170,170 In addition to base salary, this position is eligible for equity. Final salary will be determined based on several factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, expertise, education and location. In some cases, final compensation may fall outside the posted range. Salary ranges are regularly reviewed and may be adjusted in response to market trends. Benefits & Perks • Fast-paced, team-oriented environment where your work directly shapes the company’s direction. • We are a 100% remote company. • Competitive compensation & meaningful 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 required minimum of 20 days per year. • Paid parental leave (exact benefits vary by region). • Flexible stipends to support your workspace, well-being, and continued professional development. • Company MacBook. Please note: Not all of Phaidra’s benefits and perks listed above apply to temporary employees such as interns. On being Remote We take a thoughtful and intentional approach to remote collaboration. Inspired by pioneers like GitLab, we embrace proven best practices to foster an exceptional remote work environment. Our culture is documentation-first, and we prioritize asynchronous communication to support focus and flexibility across time zones. While we value independence, we stay closely connected through tools like Slack and video conferencing. Weekly all-hands meetings help us align and build strong relationships, and we regularly host virtual team-building activities and social events to maintain a sense of camaraderie. 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 [Upgrade to PRO to see contact]. 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 To be considered for any position at Phaidra, you must submit an online application. This role will remain open until it is filled. Phaidra only hires individuals who are legally authorized to work in the specified location(s) above. We do not provide employment sponsorship. Candidates requiring visa sponsorship, either now or in the future, are not eligible for hire. WE DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM RECRUITERS.