Staff Software Engineer (AI Platform)

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, 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 very experienced Software Engineer providing broad tech leadership to our growing AI Platform team. You are bold and creative, and have deep empathy for customers. 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 in one of the following areas: UK, Norway, Italy, Spain, Portugal, or Ireland.
  

Responsibilities:

The AI Platform team you are joining is responsible for building the core platform that powers model training, inference and decision making in our products. Furthermore the team owns MLOps and the services hosting our AI capabilities. Productionizing results from Research, as well as extending our systems and providing support according to our customer needs fall into team responsibilities as well. You will join this team as a very experienced engineer providing in-depth technical leadership to grow our expertise and capabilities in the team, as well as contributing as a software engineer in the team.

As an organization, we strongly believe in expertise across the stack. As such, you will experience flavors of Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, MLOps and DevOps.

In particular, you will:

• Design, build and lead the technical initiatives and vision for the AI Platform to strengthen technical excellence and raise the bar on engineering efforts.
• Mentor your peers and be a technical role-model in the team.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives collaborating with engineers, product managers and TPM across teams.
• Build and design scalable components for the AI Platform to allow high throughput training and inference for RL agents doing realtime inference for autonomous control of industrial systems.
• 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.

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 engineering initiatives on the team, identify gaps and propose roadmap items.

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 proactively drive engineering topics and technical excellence in the team and represent them throughout the company.

Key Qualifications:

• 10+ years of work experience.
• Proven record on impact as a Tech Leader and bar-raiser for ambitious Software Engineering teams
• Strong experience on designing and implementing solutions for AI production systems
• Extensive experience with platform Software Engineering with the ability to contribute on all levels as an individual contributor and tech leader
• Strong expertise on building, operating and monitoring large scale multi-tenant systems with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning, monitoring, and metrics collection
• Ability to take ownership of realtime production systems – aligning technical with business requirements, raising the bar for operational excellence and on-call incident handling
• Strong expertise in Python and Cloud environments
• Very good grasp of Machine Learning (especially Deep Learning) fundamentals
• 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 with building applications that can be deployed in cloud, as well as in hybrid or on-prem environment
• Exposure to Reinforcement Learning or other in-depth knowledge on modern ML applications
• Experience with industrial applications, industrial control systems, IoT, sensor time series applications, or similar
• Experience with MLOps practices on production systems

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, Postgres, 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• ML system design & SRE (90 minutes): In this interview, we will go over a real world MLOps problem. You can expect to draw architecture diagrams using boxes & arrows in your browser. We will talk about system design, scalability and monitoring
• ML interview (60 minutes): This interview will focus on Machine Learning approaches, algorithms and theory. You will be asked about ML algorithms you are familiar with, how they work under the hood and how to use them in an applied setting.
• Tech Lead + Product interview (60 minutes): This interview is a combination of technical and cultural fit assessment. We will cover your technical experience and the skills as an engineer and a tech lead while discussing projects that you have worked on in the past.You will meet with a member of the Product team as well as our VP of Engineering, with the opportunity to ask any questions about the team, role and engineering at Phaidra
• 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:

• UK Residents: £108,000-£162,000/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.