Senior Platform Engineer, Phaidra
$127.2-205.7k
Canada pay range: $112,680CAD - $211,280CAD. Salaries dependent on location. Plus equity
AI agentics for AI factories
Be an early applicant
AI agentics for AI factories
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$127.2-205.7k
Canada pay range: $112,680CAD - $211,280CAD. Salaries dependent on location. Plus equity
21-100 employees
Company mission
To enable AI factories to operate as a single unit of compute.
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years of professional experience in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or SRE
- Production experience operating in at least one major cloud (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
- GitOps fluency with production experience (ArgoCD, Flux, or equivalent), including rollout, drift detection, and recovery patterns
- Experience building or operating key components of an internal developer platform (e.g., self-service deployment/operations workflows, golden paths/service templates, developer portals, platform APIs, or developer tooling)
- Infrastructure-as-code experience: Terraform plus a configuration system (Kapitan, Helm, Kustomize, or similar)
- Software engineering experience in a major high level language. Comfortable writing libraries, CLIs or APIs
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple teams
Desirable
- Experience in organizations with distinct platform and productivity engineering functions
- GitLab CI pipeline design and infrastructure operation at scale
- Deep Kubernetes fluency, operating multi-cluster production environments and debugging at the node and controller level
- Distributed tracing and advanced observability (OpenTelemetry, Tempo)
- Hands-on AI/ML infrastructure at scale: GPU scheduling, distributed training, model serving, vector stores, or feature stores
- Cost optimization and FinOps practices, especially for GPU and model-serving workloads
- Service mesh and proxy patterns (Envoy, HAProxy, Istio, Nginx)
- Multi-cloud experience or cloud-agnostic abstractions (Crossplane, Terraform modules, etc.)
- Kubernetes operator development and deployment
What the job involves
- You will develop and own key parts of Phaidra's internal developer platform, including golden paths, GitOps workflows, and cloud-native foundations that product and ML teams depend on. The ideal candidate could be described as:
- Pragmatic and product-minded. You treat developer experience, reliability, and operational cost as first-class outcomes
- Comfortable partnering across engineering, SRE, and security in an all-remote setting
- Aligned with our values: Transparency, Collaboration, Operational Excellence, Ownership, & Empathy
- Own the delivery of a scoped set of developer platform capabilities end-to-end (design, implementation, rollout, iteration)
- Build and evolve paved roads (golden paths, service templates, scaffolding) that make it easy to deploy, operate, and scale services
- Run tight feedback loops with engineers across product and ML teams; measure adoption and eliminate common friction points
- Drive improvements to GitOps workflows via ArgoCD and Terraform automation via Atlantis
- Harden CI/CD on GitLab CI, including pipeline performance, safety, and developer ergonomics
- Design progressive delivery patterns (canary, blue/green) as reusable platform primitives
- Contribute to SLI/SLO frameworks and shared observability primitives (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry)
- Participate in the platform team's on-call rotation; reduce toil through automation and better system design
- Improve incident response and postmortem practice so learnings translate into systemic fixes
- Embed secure-by-default patterns into platform templates (secrets, IAM, RBAC, NetworkPolicies)
- Partner with security on compliance posture (SOC 2, ISO 27001) without slowing delivery
- Partner with infrastructure/SRE owners on Kubernetes and core cloud foundations (networking, storage, cluster/platform primitives) where it directly improves developer workflows
- Evolve cloud-native abstractions so the platform remains portable and resilient as our footprint grows (GCP today, with future optionality across providers)
- 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 Infrastructure and Engineering orgs, learning how teams operate, interact, and approach problems
- You will read the handbook and our onboarding materials to internalize Abstractions, Standards, Baselines, and Archetypes
- You will set up your development environment and complete an onboarding exercise
- You will learn team standards, release processes, and how we use GitOps and Kapitan
- You will shadow the platform on-call rotation
- By your first 60 days..
- You will have a solid understanding of Phaidra's platform and how engineering and research teams consume it
- You will have met with team members across Phaidra and started building collaborative relationships
- You will have completed the onboarding exercise and shipped a first scoped platform improvement (golden path, GitOps change, or self-service tool)
- By your first 90 days..
- You will be fully integrated into the team and collaborating effectively across the company
- 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 drive a cross-team platform initiative with measurable developer impact
Application process
- All of our interviews are held via Google Meet, and an active camera connection is required
- 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
- 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
- Technical Interview (60 minutes): This technical interview will involve candidate designing a developer-facing platform capability end to end
- Culture fit interview with Phaidra’s co-founders (30 minutes): This interview focuses on alignment with Phaidra’s values and the mutual cultural fit
Our take
The world today is filled with static, monolithic infrastructure. Factories, power plants, buildings, etc. operate in the same way they've operated for decades — because the controls programming is hard-coded. Thousands of lines of rules and heuristics 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 analyzes massive amounts of sensor data and creates intelligent AI agents that automatically control and optimize complex industrial facilities. Customers use Phaidra to improve energy efficiency and sustainability; increase plant safety and stability; and maximize yield.
With $50M in fresh funding, Phaidra is ready to scale its AI-driven approach to data center efficiency. Backed by investors including Collaborative Fund, Index Ventures, and Nvidia, the Seattle-based startup has now raised a total of $120M and continues to grow its team. As it strengthens partnerships with leading chip makers and expands globally, Phaidra is set to redefine how data centers operate.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Oct 2025
$50m
SERIES B
Jul 2024
$12m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $92.5m
Company benefits
- Fast-paced and team-oriented environment.
- Phaidra is a 100% remote company with a digital nomad policy.
- Competitive compensation & equity.
- Outsized responsibilities & professional development.
- Training is foundational; functional, and customer immersion focused.
- Monthly remote work stipend.
- 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 and company MacBook.
Company HQ
Central Business District, Seattle, WA
Leadership
Jim Gao
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously Team Lead at DeepMind's Energy Division. Before that, worked as a Technical Lead at Google.
Vedavyas Panneershelvam
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously Staff Research Engineer at DeepMind.
Katie H.
(Co-Founder & COO)Prior to co-founding Phaidra, Katie was an Innovation Senior Manager at Ingersoll Rand and an Engineering Team Lead at Trane.
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