Sr. Staff Software Engineer

Sr. Staff Software Engineer

Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise.

Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members.

Archer is designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric vertical-take-off-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft that will change the way the world moves. As a Staff / Senior Staff Software & Data Engineer you will own the architecture and code that powers every data-driven decision behind our aircraft design, manufacturing, flight-test and fleet-health operations.

Why This Role Matters

• Our eVTOL program generates petabyte-scale, high-frequency telemetry and time-series data—from CFD simulations and battery cyclers to flight-test sensor streams.
• We are building a next-generation Signal Processing on Kubernetes & AWS to unify batch, real-time and GenAI workloads. You will be the technical authority who makes that platform robust, performant and developer-friendly.

What You'll Do

• Architect, design and hands-on code distributed data services (micro-services, APIs, SDKs) in Python, Java or Scala.
• Lead the end-to-end build-out of our lakehouse-style warehouse (Parquet / Iceberg / Trino) and its streaming ingestion fabric (Kafka / Spark Structured Streaming / Flink).
• Optimize large-scale ETL/ELT and feature pipelines for time-series & telemetry (vehicle CAN, sensor logs, flight-test data) reaching tens of billions of rows per day.
• Embed GenAI & LLM workflows (vector search, RAG, agentic orchestration, LLM-powered data quality/metadata enrichment) directly into pipelines and user-facing tools.
• Champion Kubernetes-native CI/CD, observability and cost-efficient autoscaling for all data services.
• Define and enforce best-in-class data governance, lineage and security (IAM, fine-grained access, encryption).
• Partner with Data Science, Flight-Test and Manufacturing teams to turn raw data into predictive maintenance, anomaly-detection and root-cause analysis products.
• Mentor mid-level engineers, perform design reviews, and set engineering standards across the org.

You'll Thrive Here If You Have

• 10–15 years building production-grade data or platform software at scale.
• BS/MS in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering or related field.
• Deep mastery of software architecture & design patterns for distributed systems.
• Expert-level coding in Python plus one of Java / Scala; strong command of testing, profiling and performance tuning.
• Hands-on expertise with:
• Streaming & Batch: Kafka, Spark / PySpark, Flink, Airflow.
• Storage & Query: Parquet, Iceberg or Delta, Trino / Presto, lakehouse & warehouse paradigms.
• Cloud & Containerization: AWS (EKS, S3, Glue, Redshift, EMR), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform.
• Parallel / distributed compute and high-throughput, low-latency data services.
• CI/CD & Observability: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog.
• Proven track record in automotive / aerospace, telemetry, signal-processing or other time-series-heavy domains.
• Demonstrated ability to apply GenAI / LLM tooling (OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangChain, vector DBs) to real-world data products and developer workflows.
• Excellent communication; enjoy collaborating across mechanical, flight-test, manufacturing and software disciplines.

Bonus Points

• Experience deploying ML models or MLOps pipelines to edge devices or embedded compute units.

Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects.