Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer - Data Platform

GridCARE • Redwood City, CA

1d • $184,000 - $284,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

GridCARE is hiring a Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer to be a foundational owner of the data platform behind its Energize™ platform. The role covers the shared ingestion, storage, compute, and serving layers used by modeling, product, and customer-facing teams. The engineer will set technical direction for the platform on AWS, design its core abstractions, and ensure it is reliable and useful as a shared internal product.

The position also involves building, monitoring, and maintaining teams of AI coding agents to accelerate software development, with orchestration, observability, and scalability as key concerns. The engineer will own work from initial design through deployment and production operation, shape technical decisions, mentor engineers, and partner with product and domain experts. The role is based in Redwood City, California, with a hybrid schedule of three days in the office and two days remote.

Requirements

• Have been a core builder or technical owner of a data platform used by multiple teams or products, and be able to discuss its design, evolution, and potential improvements.
• Have experience making foundational platform decisions involving ingestion patterns, data modeling, schema evolution, data contracts, storage, and compute, and carrying those decisions through growth in data volume, sources, and users.
• Have experience architecting and operating production backend systems and exercising judgment about design tradeoffs.
• Have experience with distributed systems, concurrency, failure recovery, and safe migrations.
• Have hands-on AWS experience, including deployment automation, monitoring, and secure access management.
• Have strong Python, SQL, API design, and database modeling skills.
• Have hands-on experience with modern backend and data infrastructure, such as Kubernetes, Docker, workflow orchestrators, dbt, PostgreSQL, cloud warehouses or lakehouses, and/or streaming or queuing systems.
• Have experience developing ingestion and ETL/ELT pipelines into data marts and serving layers.
• Have experience building and maintaining AI coding agent teams, including task delegation, context management, and evaluation.
• Have strong testing, debugging, and technical communication skills.

Nice To Haves

• Early-stage startup experience, roughly seed through Series B, with a concrete production deliverable relied on by customers or internal teams.
• Experience taking a data platform from early stage to scale or re-architecting an existing platform while keeping it running.
• Experience designing self-serve platform capabilities, such as templates, SDKs, internal tooling, or developer-experience improvements.
• Experience with platform-level data governance, including catalogs, lineage, data quality frameworks, and fine-grained access control.
• Full-stack development experience delivering features across backend services and frontend applications.
• Experience with geospatial systems, spatial databases, or location-based applications.
• Experience building production agentic AI assistants, including setup and tool design, guardrails, natural-language querying and response quality, evaluation, and integration with security and access-control tooling.
• Experience with production data science workflows or infrastructure as code.
• Experience in energy, climate tech, or other infrastructure domains.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and roadmap of GridCARE’s data platform as an internal product with clear users, interfaces, and service levels.
• Design ingestion architecture for heterogeneous energy and grid sources, the canonical data model, and contracts that allow sources to change without breaking downstream consumers.
• Build shared foundations—including orchestration, storage layers, compute frameworks, and reusable patterns—for modeling and product engineers.
• Develop fast, reliable APIs and distributed processing services that connect energy data, analytical models, and customer workflows.
• Establish standards for data quality, lineage, observability, access control, and cost management.
• Own delivery from initial design through deployment and production operation, including on-call readiness and incident learning.
• Build and operate AI coding agent teams, including coordination and evaluation.
• Shape technical decisions, mentor engineers, and partner with product and domain experts to understand future platform needs.

Benefits

• Competitive salary, performance bonus, and equity.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Hybrid schedule: three days in the office and two days remote.
• Access to leading academic, industry, and government partners in the AI-energy ecosystem.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed