Job description
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, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, and India.
Who You Are
We are looking for an experienced software engineering leader providing broad tech leadership to our AI engineering team. You will own and drive Phaidra’s core AI/ML platform technologies with a forward looking orientation towards the advancement of reinforcement learning agents and good MLOps practices.
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.
You will understand technical details of your team’s work - often providing technical guidance 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 remain committed to rolling up your sleeves to support your team.
You know how to lead and manage a team and engineering projects to succeed on the implementation and operations of scalable AI solutions. You excel in orchestrating these endeavors in an entirely remote work setting, showcasing your prowess in managing and guiding distributed teams.
We are seeking a team member located within one of the following areas: USA, UK, or Canada.
- In the United States, we accept applicants located in the following states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, 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 AI engineering team led by you is responsible for building the core platform that powers model training, inference, and decision making for our agents. Furthermore, the team owns MLOps, productionizing prototypes from research, and providing deep ML expertise for customer support.
- Execute and Deliver - You will primarily be an individual contributor, taking part in the team’s planning process and executing on timely delivery of projects. You will perform code reviews for other team members. You will set a high bar for the team’s designs, APIs and systems. You will drive best practices in the team and take ownership of your team’s SLIs and SLOs and work with the SRE team on continuous integration & deployment, release management, monitoring and operations.
- Lead and Mentor - You will lead a high functioning team of engineers, provide them with guidance and remove blockers, help them grow and push them to perform their best - including gathering feedback and calibrating regularly in your 1:1s.
- Communicate - You will be responsible for driving effective communication both within and outside the team. You will communicate with key stakeholders across the company to align on business goals to clearly articulate vision, goals and strategy for your team. You will update relevant stakeholders periodically on progress and blockers to keep various teams aligned.
Key Qualifications
- 7+ years of work experience in software engineering, at least 2 years in a managerial role
- Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science or a related field.
- Prior experience successfully leading a team of engineers solving complex technological problems in the domain of Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning.
- Either deep expertise in ML engineering and MLOps or production level Deep Reinforcement Learning.
- Experience building large scale multi-tenant systems with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning, monitoring, and statistics/metrics collection.
- Experience as a service owner of a realtime production system - thereby understanding the importance of monitoring, oncall and operations.
- Experience delivering solutions on a combination of cloud and on-prem environments.
- Strong understanding of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
- Excellent communicator, written and verbal, ability to work in an all-remote setting across timezones
- Shares our company values: transparency, collaboration, operational excellence, ownership, and empathy
Preferred Skills & Experience
- Exposure to industrial control systems and/or processes.
- Expertise in data centers
Our Stack
- Languages - (Backend) Python, Go; (Customer SDK & Clients) C# .NET
- PyTorch
- Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform &Kapitan
- Gitlab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis
- GCP - GKE, PubSub, CloudSQL, BigTable, Postgres, etc.
- REST & gRPC micro-services
- Pantsbuild, uv
Onboarding
In your first 30 days…
- You will be immersed in an onboarding program that introduces you to Phaidra and our product.
- You will read various parts of our handbook and familiarize yourself with the documentation culture at Phaidra.
- You will familiarize yourself with our code, tools and processes in Engineering as well as the team specifically.
- 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 join the Engineering Leads meetings to get to know and integrate with your management and lead peers.
- You will meet with the team members, other engineers, as well as stakeholders from other departments to understand challenges and opportunities
By your first 60 days…
- You will build a solid understanding of what Phaidra does and how we do it.
- You will build an understanding of your team’s services and operational aspects.
- 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.
- You will establish regular 1-on-1 with all team members, lead their career development and take full people management responsibilities
By your first 90 days…
- You will become proficient at navigating the processes and software tools to fully integrate into the Engineering department as well as the AI engineering team.
- You will have begun to contribute on your own initiative representing your team as well as your own perspective.
- 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 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
General Interview Process
All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required.
- Meeting with People Operations team member (30 minutes)
- Meeting with Hiring Manager (60 minutes)
- Data Structures + Algorithms Technical Interview (60 minutes)
- ML Theory + System Technical Interview (90 minutes)
- Culture fit interview with Phaidra’s co-founders (30 minutes)
Base Salary
United States Residents
- San Francisco/New York Metro: 176,400 USD -215,600 USD
- Other cities: 146,700 USD -200,200 USD
Canada Residents
- Toronto/Vancouver: 172,800 CAD - 226,600 CAD
- Other cities: 135,900 CAD - 180,400 CAD
UK Residents
- 107,100 GBP - 130,900 GBP
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. We have dedicated all-hands meetings weekly to build strong relationships, and we hold virtual team building events as well as virtual socials.
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 [email protected].
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.
