Application Guide

How to Apply for Senior Platform Backend Engineer - Battery Storage

at Plus Power

🏢 About Plus Power

Plus Power is at the forefront of the energy transition, building large-scale battery storage systems that stabilize the grid and enable renewable integration. Their remote-first culture and focus on cutting-edge cloud infrastructure make them an exciting place for engineers passionate about climate tech and operational excellence.

About This Role

As a Senior Platform Backend Engineer, you'll design and operate the AWS-based platforms that power data pipelines, analytics, and ML workloads critical to optimizing battery storage operations. Your work directly enables a greener grid by ensuring reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient infrastructure for energy data.

💡 A Day in the Life

Your day might start with a stand-up discussing platform incidents or upcoming feature requests from data science teams. You'll then dive into Terraform or Kubernetes manifests to deploy a new service, followed by pairing with a colleague to optimize an RDS query. After lunch, you might troubleshoot a CI/CD pipeline failure or review a design doc for a new data streaming pipeline, ending the day with a quick on-call handoff.

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Interview Prep

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🎯 Who Plus Power Is Looking For

  • Experienced in building internal platforms or backend services that support data pipelines and analytics, ideally in energy or IoT contexts.
  • Deeply proficient with AWS services (VPC, IAM, EKS/ECS, RDS, S3) and Terraform, with a focus on security and cost optimization.
  • Comfortable operating Kubernetes in production, including monitoring, scaling, and troubleshooting containerized workloads.
  • Has a platform engineering mindset—thinking about developer experience, CI/CD, and observability as products for internal teams.

📝 Tips for Applying to Plus Power

1

Highlight specific AWS projects where you architected for reliability and cost efficiency, especially those involving data pipelines or ML workloads.

2

Quantify your impact: e.g., 'Reduced AWS costs by 30% through reserved instances and right-sizing ECS tasks.'

3

Mention any experience with energy data, real-time streaming, or IoT—even if tangential—to show domain interest.

4

Show your platform engineering philosophy: include examples of building self-service tools or improving developer velocity.

5

Tailor your resume to emphasize platform/backend engineering over pure SRE or DevOps—this role is about building, not just operations.

✉️ What to Emphasize in Your Cover Letter

['Your passion for renewable energy and how your platform engineering skills directly enable a greener grid.', 'Specific examples of designing AWS-native systems that balanced reliability, security, and cost.', 'Your experience with containerized workloads (Docker/K8s) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) in production.', 'How you approach operational excellence (on-call, observability, CI/CD) as a core part of engineering.']

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🔍 Research Before Applying

To stand out, make sure you've researched:

  • → Read Plus Power's blog or news about their battery storage projects and how they integrate with grid operators.
  • → Understand the basics of battery energy storage (e.g., capacity, response time) and how data drives optimization.
  • → Familiarize yourself with AWS services commonly used in energy/utilities (e.g., IoT Core, Kinesis, Timestream).
  • → Review their engineering culture via LinkedIn or Glassdoor to see how they value platform engineering.

💬 Prepare for These Interview Topics

Based on this role, you may be asked about:

1 Walk me through a platform you built or improved: architecture, trade-offs, and impact on internal teams.
2 How would you design a cost-optimized AWS pipeline for streaming energy data from thousands of batteries?
3 Describe a time you handled a production incident in a Kubernetes cluster. What was your process?
4 How do you ensure security in a multi-account AWS setup with IAM and VPC peering?
5 What metrics do you use to measure the health of a platform service, and how do you set SLIs/SLOs?
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⚠️ Common Mistakes to Avoid

  • Focusing only on operations (SRE) without showing backend development or platform-building experience.
  • Ignoring cost efficiency—this role explicitly mentions cost, so be ready to discuss trade-offs.
  • Not demonstrating domain interest—energy storage is niche; showing genuine curiosity sets you apart.

📅 Application Timeline

This position is open until filled. However, we recommend applying as soon as possible as roles at mission-driven organizations tend to fill quickly.

Typical hiring timeline:

1

Application Review

1-2 weeks

2

Initial Screening

Phone call or written assessment

3

Interviews

1-2 rounds, usually virtual

✓

Offer

Congratulations!

Ready to Apply?

Good luck with your application to Plus Power!

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