Site Reliability Engineer - Phaidra
Seattle, WA
About the Job
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 100% remote; we do not have a physical office. We hire employees internationally with the help of our partner, OysterHR. Our team is currently located throughout the USA, Canada, UK, Norway, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Singapore, and India.
Who You Are
Phaidra is looking for a driven Site Reliability Engineer to be a part of our engineering team. You are bold and creative, and have deep empathy for customers who may not be tech-savvy. You will work in the Infrastructure Engineering team to build and maintain world class infrastructure. You will have the opportunity to make an immediate impact with your work and guide the product and team as we grow.
*We are seeking a team member located within one of the following areas: USA and Canada
- In the United States, we accept applicants located in the following states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, 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.
Responsibilities
The ideal candidate has expertise building and managing cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP or Azure and has good knowledge of Kubernetes, CI/CD and Observability. Your responsibilities will include flavors of Infrastructure Engineering, MLOps, SRE and DevOps. As a Site Reliability Engineer, it will be expected of you to be an Individual Contributor (IC) in the Infrastructure Engineering team.
- You will help build and maintain infrastructure for:
- Large-scale data ingestion and processing.
- Distributed model training, evaluation and inference.
- Automating the end-to-end system for continuous improvement and deployment.
- Developer environments and build systems.
- Multi-cloud deployments.
- You will work with cloud services like AWS, Azure, GCP.
- You will work with Cloud Native technologies like Kubernetes, Prometheus and gRPC.
- You will help build CI/CD infrastructure, pipelines and take part in DevOps duties.
- You will apply SRE principles for observability, SLOs, automation and change management.
- You will write and maintain tooling and documentation for infrastructure, supported applications and processes.
- Build and maintain cross-functional relationships with internal teams to drive initiatives.
Key Qualifications
- 5+ years of work experience.
- Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
- Proven experience automating Cloud and Networking infrastructure on AWS, GCP or Azure.
- Good understanding of Linux-based Operating Systems, Containerisation and Orchestration technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
- Experience with Terraform or other configuration management tools like Jsonnet, Kapitan, Helm or Kustomize.
- Experience with Monitoring stacks such as Prometheus, Influx, Stackdriver or Zabbix.
- Programming experience, ideally with Python, Go or Bash scripting.
- Experience with writing Kubernetes Operators.
- Good understanding of DevOps, SRE principles and Platform Engineering.
- Share our company values: curiosity, ownership, transparency & directness, outcome-based performance, and customer empathy.
Preferred Skills & Experience
- Expertise with multi and hybrid cloud environments.
- Experience with Software Engineering.
- Expertise with some parts of our tech stack is a big plus.
- Experience in automating scalable multi-tenant systems architectures with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning, monitoring, and statistics/metrics collection.
Our Stack
- Languages - (Backend) Python, Go; (Frontend) JavaScript/TypeScript, React; Customer SDK & Clients - C# .NET
- PyTorch
- Cypress
- Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform & Kapitan
- Custom Kubernetes Operators (with kopf)
- Gitlab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis, Vercel
- GCP - GKE, PubSub, CloudSQL, BigTable, Postgres, etc.
- Ray.io
- REST & gRPC micro-services
- Poetry, Pantsbuild
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 and infrastructure 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.
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 will help you be successful at your job.
- You will have completed the onboarding exercise and will be on your way to completing your first production task.
By your first 90 days...
- You will have been fully integrated in the team and with team members across the company.
- You will get a more in-depth understanding of our system architecture and infrastructure.
- You will have completed your first on-call experience helping monitor and improve our production environments.
- You will have become an expert with our tooling.
- You will have started to 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.
- Initial screening interview with a People Operations team member (30 minutes)
- Meeting with Director, Infrastructure Engineering (30 minutes)
- Take Home Exercise
- Meeting with Site Reliability Engineers (60 minutes)
- Meeting with VP of Engineering (60 minutes)
- Culture fit interview with Phaidra's co-founders (30 minutes)
Base Salary Range
- US Residents: $92,800-$178,000/year
- Canada Residents: CA$113,600-CA$180,000/year
This position will also include equity.
These are best faith estimates of the base salary range for this position. It is important to note that the salary bands provided are inclusive of multiple levels and the actual candidate level will be determined during the interview process. In addition to this, other factors such as experience, education, and location will be taken into consideration when deciding final 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. Most teams meet daily, and we have dedicated all-hands meetings weekly to build strong relationships. We hold virtual team building events once per quarter - and even hold virtual socials to watch rocket launches! We have had all-company summits in locations like Seattle, Athens, Goa, and Barcelona.
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 hiring@phaidra.ai.
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.
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WE DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM RECRUITERS.
