Senior Platform Engineer

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 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 we are 100% remote with no physical office. We hire employees internationally with the help of our partner, OysterHR. Our team is currently located throughout the USA, Canada, UK, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, and India.

Who You Are

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.

**We are seeking a team member based in the United States, Canada, or the UK.  

Responsibilities

1. Developer Platform
   • 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.
2. GitOps, CI/CD, and Delivery Workflows
   • 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.
3. Reliability + Operational Excellence
   • 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.
4. Security Defaults + Platform Standards
   • 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.
5. Infrastructure Foundations
   • 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).

Key Qualifications

• 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

Preferred Skills & Experience

• 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).

Nice-to-haves

• 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.

Our Stack

• Languages: Python, Go, Bash
• IaC & Config: Kapitan, Terraform, Crossplane
• Containers & Orchestration: Kubernetes
• CI/CD & Delivery: GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis
• Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry