Senior Software Engineer (Data Platform)

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.