Principal Software Engineer, Power Applications

Utilidata•Ann Arbor, MI

1d•$180,000 - $220,000•Remote

About The Position

Utilidata is a fast-growing NVIDIA-backed AI company enabling AI data centers to dynamically orchestrate power and unlock more compute capacity from existing energy infrastructure. For over a decade, we have applied AI to the electric grid — bringing real-time visibility and power-flow control to complex energy infrastructure. Our Karman platform, built on a custom NVIDIA module, brings that same capability to AI data centers, giving operators a way to better use the power already available to them. The Power Applications team takes power control and orchestration algorithms from idea to production. We own the complete end-to-end process: developing power control and orchestration algorithms, translating them into deployable applications, and owning the deployment and maintenance of those applications in the field. As the Technical Lead, Power Applications, you will coordinate data scientists and software engineers to produce these applications, define repeatable and scalable workflows that let the team deliver efficiently, and act as the technical interface to other teams on the stack. This is a leadership role. While you will still spend meaningful time in the codebase, a large part of the work is communication, coordination, and project management. Your leverage comes from the designs you set, the standards you hold, the engineers you develop, and your ability to keep cross-functional work moving. Success in this role is measured by driving continuous delivery, building for scale and resilience, and navigating the demands of a rapidly growing company. This position works cross-functionally with product, engineering, and data science teams and is open to fully remote candidates, with periodic travel expected for company retreats and key on-site engagements.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record of technical leadership on complex production systems
Demonstrated ability to lead engineers through architecture, code review, and mentorship, and to raise the technical bar of a team
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with substantial experience working directly with stakeholders across teams
Strong project management and technical planning skills — sequencing work, managing cross-team dependencies, translating product requirements into technical designs
Strong foundation in distributed systems and reliability engineering: fault tolerance, graceful degradation, observability, and testing for systems that cannot go down
Experience taking software from prototype to hardened production, ideally where the platform and requirements were still evolving
Proficiency in Python and at least one systems language (C++, Rust, or Go)
Willingness to travel up to 10% of time

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with real-time, low-latency, or control systems : software that must respond within strict time bounds and behave predictably under load
Experience with edge or embedded computing, especially on NVIDIA platforms (Jetson-class devices, CUDA, or NVML)
Background in power systems, energy, industrial control, robotics, or another physical-world real-time domain)
Experience productionizing ML models or algorithms in collaboration with data science teams

Responsibilities

Enable the Power Applications team to own the end-to-end lifecycle of Utilidata's power control and orchestration applications, from algorithm development, through translation into deployable software, to deployment and ongoing maintenance in production
Directly contribute to the Power Applications codebase and work with the team to define and own code quality standards and engineering workflows
Serve as the senior individual contributor coordinating data scientists and software engineers, aligning the group on design and quality through architecture and code review
Design continuous delivery workflows that bridge algorithm development and production, including the path from prototype code (e.g., Python) to the deployed application's language (e.g., Rust), so work moves to production smoothly and repeatably
Act as the technical interface between Power Applications and other teams on the stack, establishing clear system boundaries, data contracts, and power application SLAs
Contribute to system architecture discussions for the Karman platform as a whole, ensuring the subsystems that support power-flow control fit coherently into that wider architecture
Build for reliability and scale so power applications run continuously across experimentation, staging, and deployed environments.