Senior or Staff Product Engineer, Backend-Leaning

Location: Redwood City, CA (Hybrid) or Remote - US

Team: Engineering

Type: Full-time

About GridCARE

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.

The Role

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.

What You’ll Do

• 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

What We’re Looking For

• 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 Have

• 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

Why GridCARE

• Work on a problem that directly affects the speed of deploying new AI and energy infrastructure

• Help build a product from the ground up alongside domain experts and experienced infrastructure teammates

• Own meaningful technical scope in a small, high-trust team

• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits

• Hybrid collaboration in Redwood City with flexibility for remote work

Our Philosophy

We believe small teams of strong engineers can solve important, real-world infrastructure problems.

We value clear thinking, strong ownership, pragmatic execution, and systems that hold up in production. We move quickly, but we care about correctness, reliability, and building software that customers can trust.

If you’re excited about building backend-heavy product software at the intersection of energy, infrastructure, and modern SaaS, we’d love to talk.