Senior Software Engineer (Control Plane)

Who You Are

We are looking for a driven Software Engineer (Backend) to lay the technical foundation of our Control Plane team, to establish services, APIs, contracts and processes to control our customer serving core systems.

You are bold and creative, and have deep empathy for customers and users. 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 within one of the following areas: USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Italy, or Portugal.

• In the United States, we accept applicants located in the following states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, 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.

UK-based candidates may have personal data shared with UK Visas & Immigration.

Please note that this role's start date would be January 2025. 

Responsibilities

The Control Plane team you are kicking off will be responsible for providing services, APIs and processes to orchestrate our core customer serving products. You will take ownership, work hands-on and provide technical guidance to the team and relevant stakeholders on the design, implementation and technical planning of the control plane. You will shape this new team and its deliverables from the very beginning as an experienced engineer with a focus on backend solutions.

As an organization, we strongly believe in expertise across the stack. As such, you will have opportunities to contribute on a broad range of topics including Distributed Systems, MLOps and DevOps.

In particular, you will:

• Design, build and lead the engineering initiatives and technical vision for a new Control Plane team to ensure excellence on usability, orchestration, integration and operations on services allowing internal users and other services to trigger changes and actions on our data processing and AI workloads serving customers in production.
• 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.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives collaborating with engineers, product managers and TPM across teams.
• Mentor your peers and be a technical role-model in the team.

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 the Control Plane work within an existing team, identify gaps and propose roadmap items on the topic.

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 take proactively drive control plane topics and represent it technically throughout the company, as well as informing the formation of a dedicated team around the topic.

Key Qualifications

• 6+ years of work experience.
• Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• Strong experience on designing and implementing services, APIs and backend solutions
• Expertise with production Software Engineering - relational and non-relational data modeling, micro-services, understanding of event driven systems, etc.
• Strong experience building large scale multi-tenant systems with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning, monitoring, and statistics/metrics collection.
• Strong expertise in Python and Cloud environments
• 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 on building a control plane on top of a realtime production system
• Experience with building applications that can be deployed in cloud, hybrid or on prem environments
• Experience with or exposure to Machine Learning systems
• Experience with leading formation of a new team and owned services from a technical perspective

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, etc.
• Postgres, MongoDB, Parquet, 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.

1. 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.

2. Hiring Manager interview (30 minutes): This is an introduction call with the hiring manager so that the candidate and the hiring manager can get to know each other better. It will mainly focus on your previous experience and technical background. This meeting is also meant to enable you to ask any questions about the team & role.

3. Technical Interview 1 (75 minutes): The purpose of this interview is to assess your skills in data structures, algorithms and problem solving. This interview will involve live coding exercises.

4. Technical Interview 2 (90 minutes): In this interview, we will go over a system design problem. You can expect to draw architecture diagrams using boxes & arrows in your browser. We will talk about system design, scalability and monitoring.

5. Culture fit interview with Phaidra’s co-founders (30 minutes): This interview focuses on alignment with Phaidra’s values and the mutual cultural fit.