Platform Engineer

Base is America’s next-generation power company. We’re rebuilding the foundation of modern civilization–electricity–by deploying a vast network of distributed batteries that is transforming today’s fragile, centralized grid into a resilient and abundant system. We are engineers, operators, and creatives solving some of the most complex, interdisciplinary challenges of our time.

You will define and own the foundations that Base’s engineering teams build on.

As a Platform Engineer at Base, you will design and operate the shared infrastructure, internal platforms, and core services that shape how software and hardware-integrated systems are built across the company. Your work will have organization-wide impact, setting standards and introducing frameworks, tooling, and architectural patterns that other teams rely on.

This is a high-leverage role. You will work across backend, hardware, and infrastructure teams to remove systemic bottlenecks, simplify complex distributed systems, and raise the bar for performance, reliability, and safety across Base.

What You'll Do:

• Work closely with backend, device, and hardware teams to define service interfaces, deployment patterns, and operational standards, with a focus on safely controlling and observing hardware-connected systems.

• Identify and reduce fragmented or siloed implementations as Base’s product surface area grows, consolidating systems through direct code and architectural changes where appropriate.

• Design, build, and maintain shared platforms and infrastructure that multiple engineering teams rely on in production.

• Introduce and evolve infrastructure and system patterns that support distributed services, production workloads, and hardware-integrated systems.

• Build tooling and defaults that make it easier for engineers to develop systems, both locally and in remote environments.

• Own and continuously improve CI/CD systems as the organization scales.

• Document platform architecture, design decisions, and recommended engineering practices to propagate context and good defaults across the organization.

What We're Looking For:

• Experience working on complex or failure-prone systems, with clear opinions on why they broke down and how to design them better.

• A bias toward using code and architecture to make systems understandable, self-describing, and easy for other engineers to own.

• Strong experience in backend or infrastructure engineering within cloud-based environments.

• Hands-on experience with modern cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Experience defining and operating infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar).

• Strong programming skills in languages commonly used for backend services or tooling (e.g., Go, Python).

• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, service-oriented architectures, and containerized workloads.

• Experience designing and evolving CI/CD systems and software delivery workflows.

• Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating across backend, device, and hardware-adjacent engineering teams.

• Comfort taking ownership of broad, evolving infrastructure responsibilities in a fast-moving environment.

About This Team

America's power grid is failing—electricity costs have risen even as generation gets cheaper, and blackouts are becoming more common. We're building the software that fixes it. Our team owns the entire stack: firmware that controls batteries in thousands of homes, trading algorithms that buy and sell power in real-time markets, distributed commanding systems that orchestrate a growing fleet as a single grid asset, factory software for our Austin manufacturing line, and the product experience that makes it all invisible to homeowners. If you want to write code that physically moves electrons, ships hardware, and reshapes critical infrastructure, this is the job.

Please note: Base is a startup, which means priorities shift and evolve quickly. Your role may expand or change based on the needs of the business at any given time, so the responsibilities listed may not be exhaustive.

• First Principles Thinking: Question assumptions. Principles > rules.

• Operate at Base Pace: Focus on what matters, act quickly, and learn by doing.

• Give & Get Feedback: Be direct, be humble, and maintain a growth mindset.

• Everyone’s an Owner: Follow through on commitments and own results.

• Strong Opinions, Loosely Held: Drive clarity and make calls with imperfect information.

• Committed to the Mission: Rebuilding the grid is a big challenge. We work hard because we care deeply about the impact we’re creating. We work in-person. It’s not a 9-to-5. We are all-in.

• Fun & Optimism Coexist with Grit: Collaboration and celebration coincide with the intensity of building real things.