Senior Software Engineer

About Phaidra

Phaidra builds AI agents for AI factories.

As demand for AI grows, data centers need to get more out of the power and infrastructure they already have. Power, cooling, and compute are closely connected, and making them work efficiently is one of the biggest challenges in scaling AI.

Phaidra builds AI agents that help data center operators understand their infrastructure, troubleshoot issues, and optimize how their facilities run. Our agents connect data across IT and OT systems, helping teams find problems faster and use existing resources more effectively. Operators use Phaidra to optimize performance, reliability, and efficiency. From helping technicians get to the root cause of an issue to optimize cooling and power allocation, our work helps data centers maximize tokens per watt.

Phaidra was founded in 2019 by former Google, DeepMind, and Trane engineers. Our team brings deep experience in AI, cybersecurity, mission-critical cooling, data centers, and industrial controls. We believe deploying AI in production demands deep domain expertise. We work closely with our partners to tackle challenges around real-world infrastructure at gigawatt-scale.

Our team has a track record of applying AI to the toughest problems. We achieved superhuman performance with DeepMind’s AlphaGo and cut the energy needed to cool Google’s data centers by 40%. We know AI deeply, and we know how to apply it in production for massive impact.

Phaidra can only achieve its mission if we work well together. Our core values define how we do that: Agency, Velocity, Craft, and Truth. We look for people who embody these values. They help our team deliver excellence consistently and build an engaging, supportive culture.

Phaidra is headquartered in the USA, but we are 100% remote with no physical office. We hire internationally with support from our partner, OysterHR. Our team is spread across the USA, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, and India.

Who You Are

We are looking for a driven Senior Software Engineer to join our Engineering team. You are bold and creative, and you have deep empathy for customers, including those who may not be tech-savvy.

In this role, you will lead engineering efforts across your team and adjacent teams, driving the design and delivery of complex systems and products. You will partner with engineers, product managers, and customer-facing teams to solve hard problems, and you will raise the bar for the engineers around you.

**We are seeking teammates who are based in the United States or Canada (Eastern or Central timezone) or the UK.

Responsibilities

• Initiate and lead engineering efforts for projects on your team, from design through production, owning what you ship and maintaining it over time.

• Own and review project briefs and technical designs for complex features and systems, driving technical decisions and cross-team alignment.

• Coordinate across teams and ensure your team’s work fits into and improves the broader systems.

• Write clean, well-tested code with clear and extensible interfaces, being careful not to create undue technical debt.

• Find points of friction and drive improvements to how the company designs, builds, tests, and operates software.

• Evaluate technologies and tradeoffs systematically and holistically, extending your team's understanding of the existing tech stack to meet changing requirements.

• Mentor engineers on your team and across teams, helping them grow their craft through pairing, reviews, and thoughtful feedback.

• Collaborate with product, design, customer engineering, and other teams to identify technical blindspots, clarify ambiguity, and deliver iteratively.

• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate your team's delivery, establishing patterns and practices for effective use.

• Lead operational excellence for your team's products, ensuring reliability and performance through on-call ownership, tooling, documentation, and CI/CD practices.

Key Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.

• Experience designing, building, and operating complex production systems, including distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and data modeling at scale.

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects that require coordination across multiple teams.

• Strong debugging skills and a pragmatic approach to reliability and performance.

• Production experience in Python (or similar) and Cloud environments.

• Experience building, operating, and monitoring modern SaaS applications, APIs, and high-throughput services.

• Experience with production software engineering, including relational and non-relational data modeling, micro-services, understanding of event driven systems, etc.

• Experience operating services in production using observability tooling (for example: Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, or equivalent).

• Experience with at least one strongly typed language (for example: Go, Java, C#, or TypeScript) is a plus.

• Comfortable collaborating across teams and communicating clearly in an all-remote setting.

• Share our company values: Agency, Velocity, Craft, Truth

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Experience building multi-tenant systems with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning.

• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

• Familiarity with machine learning systems in production, including training pipelines, evals, or MLOps.

Our Stack

• Languages: Python, Go, and C# (.NET)

• PyTorch

• Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Kapitan

• GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis

• GCP: GKE, PubSub, CloudSQL, BigTable, Postgres, etc.

• REST and gRPC micro-services

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 teams operate, interact, and approach problems.

• You will read various parts of our handbook and familiarize yourself with Phaidras documentation culture.

• You will set up your development environment and complete an onboarding exercise that introduces you to our code base.

• You will learn how we plan and execute work and be able to navigate our sprint boards and backlogs.

• You will learn team standards and development and release processes.

• You will start to learn about our system architecture and infrastructure.

• You will pick up a few starter tasks to get familiar with the end-to-end development and release flow.

• You will shadow customer and internal stakeholder conversations to understand real-world use cases and pain points.

By your first 60 days...

• You will have a solid understanding of what Phaidra does and how we do it.

• You will have met with team members across Phaidra and started building relationships that help you be successful.

• You will have completed the onboarding exercise and shipped your first production change.

By your first 90 days...

• You will be fully integrated into the team and collaborating effectively across the company.

• You will have a deeper understanding of our system architecture and infrastructure.

• You will have participated in the on-call rotation and contributed improvements to reliability and operational practices.

• You will be comfortable with our tooling and contribute to knowledge sharing throughout Phaidra.

General Interview Process

All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required.

1. Meeting with People Operations team member (30 minutes)

2. Meeting with Hiring Manager (30 minutes)

3. Data Structures and Algorithms Technical Interview (45 minutes)

4. System Design Technical Interview (60 minutes)

5. Cross-Functional Collaboration Interview (45 minutes)

6. Culture fit interview with one of Phaidra’s co-founders and VP of Engineering (30 minutes)

We use Kula as our hiring platform. During your interview, Kula's AI Notetaker will record a transcript of the meeting to allow the interviewer to focus on the interview, not the note taking.

Base Salary

US Residents:

• Tier 1 (Largest highest-cost metros): 138,507 USD - 203,144 USD

• Tier 2 (Other major metros): 131,582 USD - 192,987 USD

• Tier 3 (Mid-sized metro areas): 124,657 USD - 182,830 USD

• Tier 4 (All other locations): 117,731 USD - 172,673 USD

Canada Residents:

• Tier 1 (Vancouver, Toronto): 142,316 CAD - 208,731 CAD

• Tier 2 (Montreal): 132,829 CAD - 194,815 CAD

• Tier 3 (Waterloo, Ottawa, Calgary): 113,853 CAD - 166,984 CAD

• Tier 4 (Smaller cities / rural areas): 104,365 CAD - 153,069 CAD

UK Residents

• Tier 1 (London): 93,008 GBP - 148,812 GBP

• Tier 2 (Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Bristol): 87,537 GBP - 140,059 GBP

• Tier 3 (Smaller cities / rural areas): 82,066 GBP - 131,305 GBP

In addition to base salary, this position is eligible for equity. Final salary will be determined based on several factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, experience, expertise, education and location. In some cases, final compensation may fall outside the posted range. Salary ranges are regularly reviewed and may be adjusted in response to market trends.

Benefits & Perks

• Fast-paced, team-oriented environment where your work directly shapes the company’s direction.

• We are a 100% remote company.

• Competitive compensation & meaningful 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 required minimum of 20 days per year.

• Paid parental leave (exact benefits vary by region).

• Flexible stipends to support your workspace, well-being, and continued professional development.

• Company MacBook.

Please note: Not all of Phaidra’s benefits and perks listed above apply to temporary employees such as interns.

On being Remote

We take a thoughtful and intentional approach to remote collaboration. Inspired by pioneers like GitLab, we embrace proven best practices to foster an exceptional remote work environment. Our culture is documentation-first, and we prioritize asynchronous communication to support focus and flexibility across time zones. While we value independence, we stay closely connected through tools like Slack and video conferencing. Weekly all-hands meetings help us align and build strong relationships, and we regularly host virtual team-building activities and social events to maintain a sense of camaraderie.

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

To be considered for any position at Phaidra, you must submit an online application. This role will remain open until it is filled.

Phaidra only hires individuals who are legally authorized to work in the specified location(s) above. We do not provide employment sponsorship. Candidates requiring visa sponsorship, either now or in the future, are not eligible for hire.

Candidates who advance beyond the initial screening stage will be required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in order to continue through the interview process.

All employment offers are contingent upon successful completion of employment authorization verification and applicable background checks, in accordance with local laws and company policies.

WE DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM RECRUITERS.