Senior Platform Engineer (On-Premises Platform)

Job type: Full Time · Department: Infrastructure · Work type: Remote

United States

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: Agency, Velocity, Craft, and Truth. 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 are a senior platform engineer who has built and operated platform infrastructure inside customer-controlled networks, where the environment cannot be treated like another cloud account. You are comfortable using software and automation to create consistent deployment environments across operating systems, networking, compute, storage, and observability.

You have deep empathy for customers and their IT and operations teams. You can turn site-specific constraints into reusable platform capabilities without pretending that every facility is identical.

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

About the Role

You will lead the design and implementation of the infrastructure that allows Phaidra’s control software to be deployed and operated reliably inside customer networks.

As Phaidra deploys control agents across more customer environments, we need a consistent approach to customer-site infrastructure, deployment, and operations. Working alongside the RL Control team, you will turn Phaidra’s broader infrastructure direction into systems for installing, configuring, updating, observing, and supporting deployments across varied customer networks.

This is a hands-on senior engineering role. You will make design decisions and lead implementation in this area, working with Infrastructure leadership on broader direction and with the RL Control team on requirements and integration.

What You’ll Work On

You will lead platform design and implementation within a cross-functional effort to bring Phaidra’s products into customer environments. Working alongside RL Control, Infrastructure, and customer delivery teams, you will turn recurring deployment challenges into reusable capabilities. The areas below describe that shared problem space; your work will span them as product and deployment needs evolve.

  1. Customer-Site Infrastructure

    • Design and build a standardized Phaidra infrastructure footprint inside customer networks that gives product teams a consistent target for deploying control agents and supporting services.

    • Define the compute, operating-system, networking, storage, identity, configuration, and observability capabilities that every deployment can rely on.

    • Evaluate when Phaidra should supply or standardize hardware, and integrate that hardware into a repeatable deployment and support model.

  2. Deployment Platform and Interfaces

    • Build the platform services and interfaces other teams use to package, deploy, configure, monitor, and safely update their software.

    • Provide resource isolation, health management, restart and recovery behavior, and version compatibility at the platform layer.

    • Partner with controls and product engineers to define clear contracts between the platform, deployed software, local equipment, and cloud services.

  3. Industrial Connectivity

    • Build reliable data ingress, command egress, and connection-management capabilities between Phaidra software and customer control systems.

    • Develop or integrate clients and adapters for programmable logic controllers (PLCs), building management systems (BMS), supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA), and protocols such as OPC UA and Modbus/TCP.

    • Work with customer IT and operations teams to satisfy site networking, security, access, and performance constraints.

  4. Deployment and Operations

    • Build repeatable installation, commissioning, configuration, upgrade, rollback, backup, and recovery workflows.

    • Provide remote management and diagnostics when permitted while ensuring the local platform remains safe and useful through restricted or intermittent connectivity.

    • Build telemetry, alerting, and support tooling that lets Phaidra understand platform and agent health across deployed sites.

  5. Technical Design and Delivery

    • Lead system design and implementation for customer-site infrastructure and deployment capabilities.

    • Work with RL Control to define requirements and interfaces, coordinating with other teams where needed.

    • Document technical decisions, identify broader infrastructure tradeoffs, and turn recurring needs into reusable platform capabilities.

Key Qualifications

  • 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, SRE, or a related area.

  • Experience building or operating infrastructure in customer-controlled, on-premises, hybrid, or otherwise restricted network environments.

  • Strong programming skills in a high-level language such as Python, Go, or C# and experience building maintainable automation or platform services.

  • Working knowledge of Linux, containers, networking, and production debugging.

  • Experience building repeatable automation for provisioning, configuration, deployment, updates, or operational management.

  • Ability to turn varied deployment requirements into reusable platform capabilities and supported operational patterns.

  • Demonstrated ability to lead the design and implementation of ambiguous technical work and collaborate effectively across teams.

Preferred Skills & Experience

  • Docker and Kubernetes in on-premises, hybrid, or resource-constrained environments.

  • Familiarity with deploying and supporting physical devices, gateways, or industrial-compute systems in customer networks.

  • Experience with or working knowledge of real-time operating systems (RTOS) and software that interacts with physical equipment.

  • OPC UA, Modbus/TCP, BACnet, MQTT, or other industrial and device protocols.

  • Cross-platform development for Linux and Windows.

  • Local message brokers, durable queues, and event-driven systems.

  • Private networking, certificate management, workload identity, and secrets distribution.

  • Observability for remote systems using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent tools.

Nice-to-haves

  • Secure remote access for systems operating in customer environments.

  • Synchronization between local and cloud services, including operation through limited or interrupted connectivity.

  • Bare-metal provisioning, secure boot, trusted platform modules (TPMs), or hardware-backed identity.

  • GPU or other specialized compute in customer environments.

  • Experience commissioning software that monitors or controls physical equipment.

  • Familiarity with safety-sensitive control systems.

Our Stack

  • Languages: Python, Go, C#/.NET, Bash

  • Customer-site platform: Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes

  • Industrial connectivity: PLCs, BMS/SCADA systems, OPC UA, Modbus/TCP, related protocols

  • IaC and configuration: Terraform, Kapitan, Helm/Kustomize

  • Delivery: GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Atlantis

  • Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry

  • Environments: Customer networks, on-premises systems, GCP, and Azure

Onboarding

In your first 30 days…

  • Learn Phaidra’s control products, current customer-site deployments, connectivity systems, commissioning process, and cloud architecture.

  • Embed with the Controls team and meet partners across Infrastructure, product engineering, customer delivery, and security to understand how customer-site systems are designed and operated.

  • Review representative customer network architectures, deployment constraints, industrial interfaces, and support history.

  • Set up the development environment and reproduce a representative customer-site installation.

  • Trace how a product team’s control agent moves from packaging through deployment, configuration, operation, telemetry, and update within a customer environment.

  • Review the current customer-site infrastructure, deployment, and connectivity components and identify where repeated site-specific work should become a platform capability.

  • Ship a scoped improvement to an existing deployment, connectivity, or agent-runtime workflow.

In your first 60 days…

  • Develop a detailed understanding of the constraints shared across current and planned customer deployments and the differences that should remain explicit.

  • Lead the design of one foundational platform capability, such as the standardized customer-site footprint, installation and upgrade workflow, industrial connectivity interface, hardware baseline, or remote diagnostics.

  • Define the platform interfaces, operating assumptions, security boundaries, and failure behavior for that capability.

  • Validate the design against representative customer environments and with the teams that will build on or operate it.

  • Contribute to an active customer-site deployment or commissioning effort and turn what you learn into reusable platform work.

In your first 90 days…

  • Deliver a meaningful portion of that capability through a representative end-to-end deployment.

  • Publish the interfaces, operational expectations, and testing approach that other teams will use when building and deploying control agents on the platform.

  • Demonstrate that the capability reduces bespoke deployment work, improves operability, or removes a recurring customer-site constraint.

  • Recommend the next improvements based on deployment evidence, support demand, and expected product needs.

  • Work effectively with RL Control and contribute lessons from customer-site deployments to Phaidra’s broader infrastructure direction.

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 and SRE Technical Interview (90 minutes)

  5. Customer-Site Developer Platform Interview (60 minutes)

  6. Culture fit interview with one of Phaidra’s co-founders (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): 136,496 USD - 200,194 USD

  • Tier 2 (Other major metros): 129,671 USD - 190,185 USD

  • Tier 3 (Mid-sized metro areas): 122,846 USD - 180,175 USD

  • Tier 4 (All other locations): 116,022 USD - 170,165 USD

Canada Residents:

  • Tier 1 (Vancouver, Toronto): 140,250 CAD - 205,700 CAD

  • Tier 2 (Montreal): 130,900 CAD - 191,986 CAD

  • Tier 3 (Waterloo, Ottawa, Calgary): 112,200 CAD - 164,560 CAD

  • Tier 4 (Smaller cities / rural areas): 102,850 CAD - 150,846 CAD

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 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.

#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.

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