Software Engineer, Backend - Core Experience

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.

This role requires someone who is deeply analytical, strong at systems design, and comfortable owning correctness in distributed systems. This is not a typical CRUD backend role.

Our goal is to move as many members as possible through the pipeline quickly, while scaling the business without scaling manual work linearly. We have digitized workflows around historically manual, fragmented processes. The next step is making those systems reliable, observable, and safe to operate at scale.

Top of Funnel includes the systems that bring members into the pipeline and help us understand what converts. You will build the infrastructure behind experimentation, partner integrations, lead ingestion, attribution, and workflows across direct customers, national homebuilders, and utilities.

Onboarding is where we coordinate the work required to get a battery installed. It is a multi-week process spanning members, internal teams, vendors, market-specific requirements, and automated workflows. You will build the systems that orchestrate that work and keep it correct through retries, partial failures, delayed data, changing requirements, and human intervention.

Retail is how we operate the energy business when we are responsible for powering the member’s home. You will build the software and control systems that automate routine decisions, surface exceptions, and ensure humans intervene where judgment is actually required.

In a steady state, the product needs to reflect what is happening at the home. You will connect member-facing and internal systems to live operational and telemetry data, ensuring they remain accurate and safe during outages, stale or missing data, duplicate events, retries, partial failures, and conflicting updates.

• Design and build distributed systems that support critical member and operational workflows.

• Define clear ownership, state, invariants, and failure handling for processes that span multiple services and teams.

• Build systems that remain correct under retries, duplicate events, delayed data, partial failure, concurrent updates, and manual intervention.

• Make tradeoffs between consistency, availability, latency, operational complexity, and member experience.

• Identify process bottlenecks and turn manual or error-prone work into reliable automation.

• Build infrastructure for experimentation, integrations, and workflow orchestration.

• Stream live and derived data into internal and member-facing applications.

• Write clearly and align technical decisions across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.

• Strong systems and API design fundamentals.

• Deep analytical ability and sound technical judgment in ambiguous environments.

• Experience building or operating distributed systems with real correctness requirements.

• Comfort reasoning about idempotency, ordering, state machines, reconciliation, observability, and recovery from failure.

• Ability to separate stakeholder requests from the underlying system or product problem.

• Strong written communication and a high bar for clarity.

• Experience with operationally complex products is a plus.

This team is responsible for infrastructure that simultaneously improves growth, reduces cycle time, and makes the member journey more reliable.

The systems we build have real-world consequences. Incorrect state, dropped work, or poorly handled failure modes can leave members without clear answers, create significant operational burden, or affect whether they have power when they need it.

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.