Software Engineer, Backend - Distributed Compute

ABOUT BASE

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.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Base's Distributed Compute effort turns our residential power network into a distributed GPU inference cloud. The control plane that makes this possible is responsible for fleet management, network configuration, resource scheduling and telemetry. We're hiring a Software Engineer to own and harden the backend serving path: from our OpenAI-compatible API, through the relay layer, to compute nodes in homes.

Your work will take Distributed Compute from a handful of pilot homes to a production fleet of thousands of nodes in a fundamentally new compute topology that will power the AI era.

This is a high-ownership role. You'll design what you build, instrument it, run it in production, and be on call for it.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build the backbone that connects a customer’s AI request to a GPU sitting in a real home, and make it fast and dependable at scale.

- Take Distributed Compute from a handful of pilot homes to thousands of nodes, and shape how the whole fleet runs.

- Keep every request quick: measure the delay our network adds, set an ambitious target, and hold the line.

- Ship updates without anyone noticing, with zero downtime.

- Make onboarding effortless and secure, bringing 100+ new homes online every week.

- Build the smart routing that sends each request to the right machine, and the testing to prove it holds up under load.

- Design systems that keep working when homes go offline, connections drop, or things break.

- Own what you build end to end: design it, instrument it, run it in production, and carry the pager for it.

- Help create a new kind of computing that turns the power grid into the AI era’s infrastructure.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- Distributed systems: you design and ship correct concurrent systems, including long-lived bidirectional gRPC streams, session ownership, leases and heartbeats, and graceful degradation.

- You reason clearly about failure modes, backpressure, and exactly-once vs. at-least-once semantics.

- Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure: you operate production EKS services confidently, with a working knowledge of informers, CRDs, leases, garbage collection semantics, and IAM/STS auth flows.

- You can debug the "the pod died and routers didn't notice for five minutes" class of problem.

- Ownership and operational scrappiness: you thrive with ambiguity, instrument what you build, and unblock yourself.

- You're comfortable being paged for a system you wrote, using the paging system you configured.

NICE TO HAVE

- Networking and edge connectivity: deep comfort with NAT traversal, outbound-session architectures, TLS/mTLS, and overlay networks

- LLM inference serving: hands-on experience with vLLM or similar, including OpenAI-compatible APIs, streaming, KV cache behavior, quantization tradeoffs, and TTFT/throughput benchmarking.

- You know the difference between "the model loads" and "the node serves economically."

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Distributed Compute team builds the software that turns Base's residential power network into compute capacity. That covers the control plane and the backend serving path, and the team runs what it builds in production.

Base's software team is vertically integrated, so you'll work directly with the engineers who own the hardware and the rest of the stack. We work in person and own what we ship end to end.

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.

OUR VALUES

- 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.

DO THE BEST WORK OF YOUR LIFE AT BASE.