Software Engineer (Product)
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 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, 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 Product Engineering 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 Product Engineering team at Phaidra is responsible for building the tools and applications that our customers use to configure and monitor our AI-powered control systems.
Responsibilities
As an organization, we strongly believe in expertise across the stack. As such, you will experience flavors of Software Engineering, Distributed Systems and DevOps. In particular, depending on your interest, you will -
- Contribute to the design and implementation of the product backends by writing REST & gRPC API services and scalable event-driven backend applications.
- Collaborate with Product Managers and Solution Architects to intimately understand user requirements.
- Build the backend that is used to configure and monitor autonomous AI agents for data centres and industrial facilities.
- Collaborate with Frontend Engineers to design and integrate API’s with our UI’s.
- Be a part of our global production oncall team and own and operate your services in production meeting Phaidra’s high bar for operational excellence.
- Maintain high levels of code and architecture documentation.
- Perform DevOps duties of CI/CD, Release & Deployment management.
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
- 4+ years of work experience.
- Experience operating & monitoring services in production, including using observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo or equivalent offerings.
- Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
- Experience with production Software Engineering - relational and non-relational data modeling, micro-services, understanding of event driven systems, etc.
- Share our company values: curiosity, ownership, transparency & directness, outcome-based performance, and customer empathy.
Bonus
- Experience with Machine Learning: Knowledge and preferably completed course on Supervised and Reinforcement Learning.
- Experience with the Cloud Native stack.
- Experience with containerisation and orchestration technologies like Docker & Kubernetes.
- Experience with configuring cloud infrastructure using configuration management tools like Terraform or Jsonnet, Kapitan, Helm, etc.
- Experience working in a cross-functional team with other engineers, designers & product managers.
- Exposure to some industrial control systems and/or processes.
Our Stack
- Python, JavaScript/TypeScript
- PyTorch
- React
- Cypress
- Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform & Kapitan
- ArgoCD, Atlantis, Vercel
- GCP
- Ray.io
- PubSub, CloudSQL, BigTable, Postgres
- REST & gRPC micro-services
- Poetry, Pantsbuild
Base Salary Range
UK Residents: £82,000-£105,000
India Residents: 29L-55L
This role will also include equity.
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 with an early exercise option.
- 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 stipend and company MacBook.
- Monthly internet reimbursement.
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 bi-weekly to build strong relationships. We hold virtual team building events once per month - 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
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.
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