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
Phaidra is looking for a driven engineering leader to join our Engineering leadership team as a Principal Engineer. The ideal candidate is a deeply technical and influential leader who can thrive and succeed in an entrepreneurial environment. You are able to look at problems from the birds eye view, you think in terms of systems, and are able to guide and mentor teams to implement & operate production systems. At the same time, you are also able to dive deep and get your hands dirty writing highly leveraged cross cutting code or solving complex problems for the organization. You have demonstrated experience designing & implementing large complex distributed systems and influencing teams. You have experience working in production real time machine learning systems.
Responsibilities
- Own the north star architecture for our software systems, and influence org-wide work to drive towards it.
- Lead large scale technology efforts spanning multiple teams, contributing to the design and implementation of systems where deep expertise is needed.
- Help set global development standards and practices that unlock organizational scalability and enable a culture of engineering excellence.
- Deeply understand our customers and drive a culture of customer obsession in the team. Work closely with product & customer success leadership in identifying customer use cases to inform org wide technical decisions.
- Drive process engineering initiatives in collaboration with the Solutions team, identifying opportunities for optimization, automation, and efficiency improvements.
- Lead tooling ideation and prototyping efforts to develop innovative solutions that enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and improve overall customer experience.
- Lead the banner for operational excellence across the org. Co-own org SLOs with other engineering leadership and co-represent engineering in company wide operational reviews.
- Be a technical role model; Guide & mentor senior & staff engineers.
Key Qualifications
- 10+ years of progressive work experience in a deeply technical role solving complex problems in distributed systems and/or machine learning systems; 2+ years of experience as the leading technologist across several teams.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience crafting north star architectures that enables system & organizational scalability and driving a team towards it.
- Expertise operating autonomously and leading large scale technology efforts across multiple teams.
- Expertise building & operating large scale multi-tenant distributed systems with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning and monitoring.
- Experience in productionizing realtime AI/ML systems.
- Experience delivering solutions on a combination of cloud and on-prem environments.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with an ability to influence, direct and motivate individuals and teams with or without formal authority.
- Shares our company values: transparency, collaboration, operational excellence, ownership, and empathy.
Bonus
- Exposure to industrial control systems and/or processes.
- Expertise in data centers
Onboarding
In your first 30 days…
- You will be immersed in an onboarding program that introduces you to Phaidra, our product and our customers.
- 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, explore various parts of the code base and learn about our operating, development & release processes and team standards. You will explore our system architecture & infrastructure.
- You will immerse yourself with different teams learning about their domains.
- You will have regular 1:1s with other engineering leadership.
By your first 60 days…
- You will have shipped production code to get the end to end developer experience at Phaidra.
- You will have a solid understanding of what Phaidra does, how we do it and good grasp of our overall technical architecture.
- You will hold 1:1s with other engineers to learn more about their domains, teams and their pain points.
- You will be a participant in our weekly operational review meetings, getting direct exposure to our weekly incident reports and post-mortems, learning about the operating conditions of our system.
- You will be a participant in technical design reviews and code reviews.
- You will have started forming an opinion on the direction that our architecture needs to evolve.
By your first 90 days…
- You will have been fully integrated in the org and with team members across the company.
- You will have completed your first on-call experience helping monitor and improve our production environments.
- You will have started driving improvements to our engineering processes.
- You will have started to contribute to knowledge sharing throughout Phaidra.
- You will have identified some of the core areas that we need to invest time & resources in to improve.
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
Base Salary
United States Residents
- San Francisco/New York Metro: 208,800 USD -255,200 USD
- Other cities: 172,800 USD - 236,500 USD
Canada Residents
- Toronto/Vancouver: 204,300 CAD - 267,300 CAD
- Other cities: 160,200 CAD - 213,400 CAD
UK Residents
- 126,900 GBP - 155,100 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.
