Senior Staff Engineer, Archer
Data Infrastructure
$182.4-228k
Office located in San Jose, CA
Electric air taxis
Be an early applicant
Electric air taxis
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$182.4-228k
Office located in San Jose, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unlock the skies, freeing everyone to reimagine how they move and spend time.
Role
Who you are
- The "Data-Aware" Engineer: You understand that scaling a database or a Ray cluster is different from scaling a stateless API. You know how to handle persistent volumes and data gravity
- Senior Leadership: You’ve spent time in the trenches. You’ve been on-call for 2:00 AM outages and have built the automation to ensure those outages never happen twice
- Tooling Polyglot: You don't just use tools; you contribute to them. You are comfortable writing Go or Python to extend Kubernetes Operators or automate data workflows
- Self-Directed: You thrive in ambiguity. You can take a high-level requirement ("Make Trino faster") and turn it into a multi-week infrastructure roadmap
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
What the job involves
- We are looking for a heavy-hitter to build the "Data Backbone" of our company
- You will be responsible for the architecture, scaling, and reliability of the infrastructure that powers our Data Engineering and ML teams
- Your goal is to provide a seamless, self-service environment where data scientists can go from a JupyterHub notebook to a massive Ray cluster or Trino query without worrying about the underlying hardware
- Data Plane Ownership: Architect and manage the lifecycle of high-throughput data tools including Trino, Ray, and JupyterHub on Kubernetes
- GitOps & Automation: Drive a "zero-manual-touch" philosophy using ArgoCD and Terraform to manage complex, stateful data environments
- Observability at Scale: Build high-cardinality monitoring systems using VictoriaMetrics and Vector to track pipeline health, data ingestion rates, and system performance
- ML Lifecycle Support: Maintain and optimize MLflow for model tracking, ensuring it integrates deeply with our compute and storage layers
- Engineering Sovereignty: As a self-starter, you will identify performance bottlenecks in data processing and proactively implement infrastructure-level optimizations
- Reliability: Participate in on-call rotations for the data stack, treating "data downtime" with the same urgency as a site outage
- Focus Area:
- Technologies:
- Kubernetes Expert (Scheduling, Affinity, Local NVMe, Resource Quotas)
- Deep experience with Trino (Presto) and Ray (Head/Worker patterns)
- High-performance routing via Vector and monitoring with VictoriaMetrics
- MLflow and JupyterHub (Zero-to-JupyterHub on K8s)
- Terraform (Advanced modules) and ArgoCD (ApplicationSets/Blue-Green)
Our take
With traffic, noise, and emissions becoming major challenges for urban life, Archer is building electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircrafts, led by its flagship model, Midnight, offering a cleaner, quieter alternative to traditional short-haul travel. The idea is simple: replace long car rides with quick, sustainable fluights that lift off vertically, fly over the gridlock, and help reduce urban pollution. It's a bold shift in transportation, but one that could meaningfully change how we navigate cities in the years ahead.
Midnight is designed to make these short flights practical, safe, and efficient. Its electric powertrain significantly reduce noise and emissions compared to helicopters (one of the biggest barriers to adopting urban air mobility at scale). However, eVTOLs face hurdles before becoming an everyday reality, including regulatory approvals, infrastructure build-out, and the operational testing needed to prove long-term safety and reliability. Archer is addressing these challenges with major manufacturing investment, deep engineering partnerships, and ongoing flight testing in the US and abroad.
Even with these barriers, Archer has been moving from success to success. The company is set to be the official air taxi provider for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. And its recent acquisition of Hawthorne Airport in LA will serve as both a launch site and an innovation hub for next-generation, AI-powered aviation operations. On the commercial side, Archer's partnerships with United Airlines and its growing international presence signal strong industry confidence. COmbines with newly expanded funding and successful long-range flight tests, Archer sure is a promising player in eVTOl aviation.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
44% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
Jul 2020
$55.7m
SERIES A
Total funding: $55.7m
Company HQ
Tasman and Zanker, San Jose, CA
Leadership
Adam Goldstein
(Founder & CEO)Began their career in Financial Services, before co-founding Vettery, a talent marketplace, in 2012. Founded Archer in 2018.
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