
Software Engineer, Infrastructure at Base Power Company (Austin, TX)
Base Power Company· Austin, TX·
Role details
Base Power Company at a glance
Base Power installs home batteries and sells below-market energy in Texas, earning its margin from the grid instead of your bill.
Base Power is a next-generation power company that installs whole-home backup batteries and sells fixed-rate, below-market electricity to homeowners, primarily in Texas. It coordinates its fleet of distributed batteries as a single grid asset, earning revenue from wholesale energy markets so it can keep customer rates low.
$1.3B raised · latest: Series C · $1B · October 2025 · backed by Addition, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Summary
Design and operate shared infrastructure, internal platforms, and core services for distributed battery systems. Define service interfaces, consolidate implementations, and introduce architectural patterns to improve performance, reliability, and safety across the organization.
Job description
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
You will define and own the foundations that Base’s engineering teams build on. As a Software Engineer, Infrastructure 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.
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.
Why work at Base Power Company
- Culture: Described as "intense, fast-paced, and deeply mission-driven." The company demands high output, ownership, and a bias toward action. It's explicitly stated as "not for everyone, and that's by design." This is a high-ownership, low-ambiguity environment.
- Work Model: On-site at Base HQ in Austin, Texas. Proximity to the product and team is central to how they move fast. "Do I need to be based in Texas? Yes."
- Hiring Speed: Fast process — aim for 1st conversation to offer in ~2 weeks.
- Interview Process: 3-4 hour on-site including technical assessments and behavioral/team conversations. Focus on "how [you] approach problems, communicate tradeoffs, and collaborate."
- Non-traditional backgrounds: Explicitly welcome: "We care about what you've built and how you think, not the logos on your resume. Some of our best people came from non-traditional paths."
- Engineering Culture: Heavy focus on hardware + software + field operations. Talent sources heavily from Tesla, Anduril, SpaceX — firms known for hardcore engineering and manufacturing excellence. Roles span hardware engineering, firmware, software, manufacturing, field installation/service, operations, growth, and design.
- Team Composition: ~29% of employees are in technical roles; ~15% in operations; significant representation of trades workers (11).
- Notable Perks: Opportunity to work on physical infrastructure deployed at scale; chance to contribute meaningfully to grid modernization and American energy resilience.