Senior Product Engineer, Backend-Leaning

GridCARE•Redwood City, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

GridCARE solves one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI infrastructure: access to power. As demand for new compute capacity accelerates, power availability has become a gating constraint on deploying data centers. GridCARE builds software that helps developers and utilities understand and unlock near-term grid capacity using physics-based models and modern data systems. We’re a small, ambitious team working at the intersection of energy systems, software, and infrastructure. We partner closely with utilities, developers, and infrastructure providers to turn complex grid analysis into practical products that help accelerate deployment. We’re looking for a senior backend-leaning full-stack product engineer to help build the customer-facing application layer for GridCARE. This role is centered on the application/API layer that sits between the web app and our core modeling and batch-job systems. You’ll own features end to end: understanding the user and domain problem, shaping the workflow with teammates, and shipping durable software that customers rely on. You should be strongest in the backend/application layer, but comfortable contributing across the stack when the feature demands it. You don’t need to be a designer, but you should have strong product judgment and enough frontend fluency to help raise the bar for a growing frontend team through pairing, code review, and clear technical patterns. This is a strong fit for someone who has built multi-tenant SaaS products before and enjoys turning complex backend capabilities into clean customer-facing software.

Requirements

6+ years of experience building production software, ideally including customer-facing B2B SaaS products
Strong backend engineering skills in Python, with experience designing HTTP APIs, business logic, typed request/response models, and service boundaries for production web applications
Experience maintaining clear API contracts between frontend and backend systems; familiarity with OpenAPI-based workflows is a plus
Experience with authentication and authorization systems such as OAuth2/OIDC, Auth0, Okta, RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC, and multi-tenant access control
Comfortable shipping features in a modern TypeScript frontend, even if backend is your primary strength
Ability and interest in mentoring less-experienced frontend engineers through pairing, review, and example
Experience with workflows involving file upload/download, background jobs, queues, webhooks, and real-time or near-real-time status updates
Strong product mindset and a willingness to own problems end to end
Track record of shipping in high-ambiguity startup environments with good judgment about when to prototype quickly and when to harden for production
Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate across product, domain, and infrastructure teams
Proficient with AI coding tools (e.g. Claude, Copilot). Demonstrate ability to leverage AI coding assistants effectively in day-to-day software development

Nice To Haves

Experience with FastAPI, Starlette, or similar Python ASGI frameworks
Experience with Pydantic and its larger ecosystem
Experience with PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and/or geospatial or time-series data
Experience with AWS services such as S3, RDS, EventBridge, EKS
Experience with workflow orchestration systems such as Prefect, Temporal, Airflow, or similar
Experience with observability tooling built on OpenTelemetry
Experience in energy systems, infrastructure software, climate tech, or other complex technical domains
Experience integrating LLM-based features into production applications

Responsibilities

Build and evolve the backend-for-frontend / application API layer that powers GridCARE’s web application
Own product features end to end, from understanding the user and domain problem to shipping polished, production-ready software
Design and implement HTTP APIs, webhook flows, and status/result delivery patterns for uploads, jobs, and other user-facing workflows
Define typed request/response models and clear contracts between the frontend, API layer, and backend execution systems
Implement backend services in Python that integrate with Auth0, datastores including RDS and S3, and batch-job orchestration systems
Contribute to the product surface in a modern TypeScript SPA when needed, and help establish maintainable frontend patterns
Partner closely with domain experts to turn analytical and batch workflows into usable product features
Collaborate with platform and SRE teammates on observability, deployability, reliability, and production operations
Help replace prototype-era systems with typed, testable, production-grade software
Contribute to architecture decisions, engineering standards, and development culture as the team grows