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 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, 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 an experienced Software Engineer with a focus on Distributed System tech leadership to be a part of our growing Data 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.

The Data Platform team at Phaidra is responsible for -

• Building streaming & batch components that power both realtime & historical data ingestion & processing
• Building and optimising the data and feature stores
• Building high-throughput and highly-available multi-modal APIs used throughout the organization, from agent training, to realtime inference to user facing applications.
• Building the central orchestration & metadata layer, and APIs of the core Platform.
• Building services to fetch and store external third party data (ex. weather forecasts) required for AI training.

**We are seeking a team member located in one of the following areas: the UK, Norway, Italy, Spain, Portugal, or Ireland.

Responsibilities

The Data Platform team that you are joining is responsible for building the core data platform that powers data ingestion, processing, storage and serving for all customers. We focus on multi-tenancy as a core construct while building all the layers and interact with various internal teams to provide automated tooling to utilise the raw/processed data. This is a Software Engineering role at the core, and you will join as an experienced engineer to scale our service across batch and stream processing as we grow.

As an organization, we strongly believe in expertise across the stack. As such, you will experience flavors of Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, MLOps and DevOps. As a Software Engineer(Tech Lead, Data Platform) you will play a Tech Lead role in the Data platform team and in particular:

• Build and design scalable components for the Data platform to allow high throughput data ingestion & data processing, which feeds the data into agents doing realtime inference for autonomous control of industrial systems.
• Design and develop systems to store and serve batch data for agent training or analytics.
• 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.
• Design and optimize data storage & retrieval mechanisms for h