Staff Software Engineer (AI Platform)

Who You Are

We are looking for a very experienced Software Engineer providing broad tech leadership to our growing AI 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.

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 in one of the following areas: UK, Norway, Italy, Spain, Portugal, or Ireland.

Responsibilities

The AI Platform team you are joining is responsible for building the core platform that powers model training, inference and decision making in our products. Furthermore the team owns MLOps and the services hosting our AI capabilities. Productionizing results from Research, as well as extending our systems and providing support according to our customer needs fall into team responsibilities as well. You will join this team as a very experienced engineer providing in-depth technical leadership to grow our expertise and capabilities in the team, as well as contributing as a software engineer in the team.

As an organization, we strongly believe in expertise across the stack. As such, you will experience flavors of Machine Learning, Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, MLOps and DevOps.

In particular, you will:

Design, build and lead the technical initiatives and vision for the AI Platform to strengthen technical excellence and raise the bar on engineering efforts.
Mentor your peers and be a technical role-model in the team.
Lead cross-functional initiatives collaborating with engineers, product managers and TPM across teams.
Build and design scalable components for the AI Platform to allow high throughput training and inference for RL agents doing realtime inference for autonomous control of industrial systems.
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.

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 engineering initiatives on the team, identify gaps and propose roadmap items.

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 proactively drive engineering topics and technical excellence in the team and represent them throughout the company.

Key Qualifications

10+ years of work experience.
Proven record on impact as a Tech Leader and bar-raiser for ambitious Software Engineering teams
Strong experience on designing and implementing solutions for AI production systems
Extensive experience with platform Software Engineering with the ability to contribute on all levels as an individual contributor and tech leader
Strong expertise on building, operating and monitoring large scale multi-tenant systems with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning, monitoring, and metrics collection
Ability to take ownership of realtime production systems - aligning technical with business requirements, raising the bar for operational excellence and on-call incident handling
Strong expertise in Python and Cloud environments
Very good grasp of Machine Learning (especially Deep Learning) fundamentals
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 with building applications that can be deployed in cloud, as well as in hybrid or on-prem environment
Exposure to Reinforcement Learning or other in-depth knowledge on modern ML applications
Experience with industrial applications, industrial control systems, IoT, sensor time series applications, or similar
Experience with MLOps practices on production systems

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, Postgres, 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. Hiring manager interview (30 minutes): The purpose of this meeting is for you to get to know the manager for the role. This chat will mainly focus on your previous experience and technical background. You can expect to talk about projects that you have worked on in the past and ask any questions about the team & role.

2. 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.

3. ML system design & SRE (90 minutes): In this interview, we will go over a real world MLOps problem. You can expect to draw architecture diagrams using boxes & arrows in your browser. We will talk about system design, scalability and monitoring

4. ML interview (60 minutes): This interview will focus on Machine Learning approaches, algorithms and theory. You will be asked about ML algorithms you are familiar with, how they work under the hood and how to use them in an applied setting.

5. Tech Lead + Product interview (60 minutes): This interview is a combination of technical and cultural fit assessment. We will cover your technical experience and the skills as an engineer and a tech lead while discussing projects that you have worked on in the past.You will meet with a member of the Product team as well as our VP of Engineering, with the opportunity to ask any questions about the team, role and engineering at Phaidra

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

Base Salary

UK Residents: £108,000-£162,000/year

Salary ranges for other countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Ireland) will vary based on the market rate for the location.

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.