Senior Backend Platform Engineer – Real-Time Cloud-Native

GridCARE; Redwood City (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Health coverage

Lunch provided 3 days a week

Hybrid schedule

Job summary

GridCARE, based in Redwood City, CA, seeks a Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer to own the architecture and operate mission-critical backend systems in production. You will build a cloud-native platform for data-center-scale AI workloads, with focus on reliability, real-time processing, and secure, scalable design.

Join a mission-driven team shaping the energy transition, collaborating with data scientists and power systems engineers.

Qualifications

• Experience architecting, implementing, and operating cloud native, real time backend systems that are highly available, reliable, secure, and scalable.
• Strong software architecture, distributed systems, concurrency, and security fundamentals.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language, e.g., Python.
• Strong experience with REST/gRPC API design and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with time series data, real time streaming, and databases across relational and non relational systems (e.g., Kafka, MQTT, TimescaleDB, or similar).
• Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and production operations.
• Experience with AI assisted development tools such as Cursor, CodeRabbit, Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, comfortable prioritizing and working cross functionally in a startup environment with limited guidance and evolving requirements.

Responsibilities

• Build a cloud native backend platform that is reliable, real time, scalable, and secure, including: Time series data storage and retrieval.
• Real time streaming and event processing.
• Integrations with simulation, forecasting, optimization, and market modules.
• Design for continuous deployment and safe updates to live, mission critical infrastructure, so systems keep running without disruption or unexpected side effects.
• Lead code quality and engineering excellence: automated testing, continuous deployment, CI/CD pipeline development, performance tuning, and system observability.
• Own architecture decisions with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance, cybersecurity, and suitability for on premises control center deployments.
• Collaborate across disciplines, working alongside data scientists, power systems engineers, and DevOps teams to bring AI driven solutions from prototype to production in mission critical environments.
• Own services end to end, from design through deployment and ongoing operation.

Skills

Backend architecture

Python

REST/gRPC API design

Event-driven systems

Time series / real-time data

Docker & Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Security fundamentals

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

MQTT

TimescaleDB

Cursor

CodeRabbit

Claude

GitHub Copilot

Job description

GridCARE, based in Redwood City, CA, seeks a Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer to own the architecture and operate mission-critical backend systems in production. You will build a cloud-native platform for data-center-scale AI workloads, with focus on reliability, real-time processing, and secure, scalable design.

Join a mission-driven team shaping the energy transition, collaborating with data scientists and power systems engineers.