Staff Data Engineer, Archer
$17.5-215k
More information about location
4 days a week in office (San Jose, CA)
Electric air taxis
Open for applications
Electric air taxis
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$17.5-215k
More information about location
4 days a week in office (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
- 5+ years of professional data engineering experience excluding internships
- BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field
- Hands-on experience building production pipelines with tools like Apache Spark, Flink, Airflow, dbt, or similar batch/streaming frameworks
- Deep proficiency with columnar formats (i.e. Parquet), open table formats (Apache Iceberg or Apache Paimon), and object storage systems (S3 or equivalent)
- Experience with high-throughput messaging systems such as Apache Pulsar or Kafka for real-time data ingestion
- Strong SQL skills; experience with StarRocks for large-scale analytical queries and real-time analytics over the lakehouse
- Familiarity with AWS data services (S3, Glue, EMR) and containerized workloads (Docker/Kubernetes) in production environments. Airflow/Prefect/Dagster
Desirable
- Experience with CDC (Change Data Capture) replication from transactional systems (i.e. PostgreSQL → Lakehouse via Debezium or Airbyte)
- Exposure to audio or time-series data pipelines, including preprocessing for ASR or speech model training
- Prior experience in aerospace, aviation, or other safety-critical domains where data lineage and auditability are non-negotiable
What the job involves
- Archer is best known for Midnight, our electric aircraft. This role isn't on that program
- The AI Products Org is building software for the general aviation industry
- As a Staff Data Engineer on the AI Platform team, you will design, build, and operate the data infrastructure that powers large-scale model training and inference
- You will own the pipelines, storage systems, and data quality mechanisms that sit upstream of our ML platform, ensuring models train on clean, high-throughput, well-governed data
- Design and maintain high-throughput, fault-tolerant ingestion and transformation pipelines that feed training workloads at scale, with a focus on latency, throughput, and correctness
- Build and operate the data lakehouse — defining table formats (Iceberg, Paimon, Parquet), partitioning strategies, and compaction policies optimized for ML consumption patterns
- Instrument pipelines with data quality checks, lineage tracking, and anomaly detection so that model failures trace back to data problems quickly
- Partner with ML engineers to define feature stores, dataset versioning, and experiment-to-production data contracts; integrate with tools like MLflow for dataset and artifact tracking
- Work closely with AI researchers, platform engineers, and software engineers to understand data access patterns, optimize query performance, and unblock training runs
Our take
With traffic, noise, and emissions becoming major challenges for urban life, Archer is building electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, 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 flights 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 reduces 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. Combined 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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