Senior Staff Software Engineer, Archer
More information about location
Office located in San Jose, CA
Urban air mobility developer
Be an early applicant
Urban air mobility developer
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
Office located in San Jose, CA
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To accelerate the benefits of sustainable air mobility.
Role
Who you are
- 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
Desirable
- Experience deploying ML models or MLOps pipelines to edge devices or embedded compute units
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
- 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
Our take
Electric air taxis may sound like a pipedream, but companies like Archer are in the process of testing models that they hope to begin producing at scale in 2025. Designed to be quiet and efficient, its current model can fly at speeds of 150 miles per hour and cover 60 miles per flight. With urban transport in mind, these air taxis are both greener and vastly more efficient than traditional vehicles.
Given the congestion and pollution issues that many cities are facing, it's easy to imagine such transport taking over. It’s also worth noting that although Archer plans to run them with human pilots initially, the company has automation as part of its long-term goals.
Other players exist in this space: EHang, a Chinese firm, flew its first aerial taxi in America in 2020. However, Archer has big backers and customers such as United Airlines (acting both as an investor and launch customer) and manufacturing partner Stellantis with whom it is mass-producing its flagship Midnight eVTOL aircraft.
There's certainly a growing demand for clean transport without sacrificing speed, but many barriers still remain in Archer's way as it must help to initiate a seismic shift in transportation infrastructure and behaviors to reach mass adoption. That being said, it has the funding behind it, raising close to $2 billion in post-IPO funding since 2021.
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
(CEO)Started their career in financial services, before co-founding Vettery, a talent marketplace, in 2012. Founded Archer in 2018.
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