Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer - Data Platform
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Redwood City
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Prior data platform experience: you've been a core builder or technical owner of a data platform used by multiple teams or products — not just pipelines for a single use case. Please be ready to walk
- Experience making foundational platform decisions — ingestion patterns, data modeling, schema evolution and data contracts, storage and compute layout — and carrying them through growth in data volume
- Experience architecting and operating production backend systems, with clear judgment on design tradeoffs.
- Experience with distributed systems, concurrency, failure recovery, and safe migrations.
- Hands-on AWS experience, including deployment automation, monitoring, and secure access management.
- Strong Python, SQL, API design, and database modeling skills.
- Hands-on experience with modern backend and data infrastructure, such as Kubernetes, Docker, workflow orchestrators (Airflow, Prefect, or Dagster), dbt, PostgreSQL, cloud warehouses or lakehouses (Red
- Experience developing ingestion and ETL/ELT pipelines into data marts and serving layers.
- Experience building and maintaining AI coding agent teams, including task delegation, context management, and evaluation.
- Strong testing, debugging, and technical communication skills.
Nice to have
- Early-stage startup experience with a demonstrable deliverable: you've worked at an early-stage startup (roughly seed through Series B) and can point to something concrete you shipped there — a platfo
- Experience taking a data platform from early stage (0→1) to scale, or re-architecting an existing platform while keeping it running.
- Experience designing self-serve platform capabilities: templates, SDKs, internal tooling, or developer-experience improvements that reduced the load on the platform team.
- Experience with data governance at the platform level: catalogs, lineage, data quality frameworks, and fine-grained access control.
- Full-stack development experience, including delivering features across backend services and frontend applications.
- Geospatial systems, spatial databases, or location-based applications.
- Experience building agentic AI assistants in production: setup and tool design, guardrails, natural-language querying and response quality, evaluation, and integration with security and access-control
- Production data science workflows or infrastructure as code.
- Experience in energy, climate tech, or other infrastructure domains.
Full description
Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer – Data Platform
About Us
GridCARE is the pioneer of Power Acceleration — a new category solving the most critical constraint in AI's growth trajectory: immediate access to power. As demand for computing skyrockets, access to energy has become the defining bottleneck in the AI infrastructure race. While leading tech companies invest billions in speculative, long-term solutions that may take decades to arrive, GridCARE's Energize™ platform uses physics-based AI to identify and activate gigawatts of hidden capacity in today's electric grid — enabling hyperscalers, data center developers, and utilities to power AI infrastructure years sooner than conventional approaches and without costly upgrades.
Founded at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, GridCARE has assembled a world-class team spanning power systems, AI, and infrastructure, and is backed by leading climate-tech and deep-tech investors.
At GridCARE, you will:
- Work at the intersection of AI, energy, and infrastructure — the foundation of the next industrial revolution.
- Partner with hyperscalers, developers, and utilities on high-impact, real-world deployments.
- Help shape a more abundant, efficient, and resilient energy future for the digital era.
- Join a company defining a new category — Power Acceleration for AI.
- Receive competitive compensation, equity, and benefits in a fast-growth, mission-driven environment.
Learn more about GridCARE:
- TechCrunch: GridCARE thinks more than 100 GW of data-center capacity is hiding in the grid
- Utility Dive: Portland General Electric invests in AI-powered flexibility to speed data-center connection
- GridCARE Raises $64 Million Series A to Create a New Category: Power Acceleration
- GridCARE Named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer for AI Power Innovation
The Role
We're hiring a Senior/Staff Backend Software Engineer who has built and run a data platform before — and wants to do it again for a problem that matters. You'll be a foundational owner of the platform behind Energize™: the shared ingestion, storage, compute, and serving layers that our modeling, product, and customer-facing teams all build on.
This isn't a role for someone who has only consumed a platform. We're looking for an engineer who has designed one: someone who has decided how data enters a system, defined the abstractions other engineers rely on, made the platform reliable enough that teams stop thinking about it, and lived with the consequences of those decisions in production. You'll bring that pattern recognition to GridCARE and set the technical direction for our platform on AWS.