Senior Software Engineer (Control Plane)

Senior Software Engineer (Control Plane)

Remote

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.

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, Japan, Singapore, 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 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 own 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, 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.

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.

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 on-call 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.

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.

Bonus

• Experience on building a control plane on top of a real-time 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.

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

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.