Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end architecture of Helion’s data platform, the nervous system that keeps our fusion generators, global supply chain, and 24/7 manufacturing lines running. You will design, build, and harden secure, scalable, and fault-tolerant pipelines that move petabytes of data between CAD/PLM systems, ERP, MES, IoT sensors, and cloud analytics—turning raw signals into decisions that affect millions of parts per day.
• • Architect and implement both batch and real-time data flows using Kafka, Flink, Iceberg, and Postgres to guarantee sub-second latency for mission-critical alerts while still powering long-range forecasting models that run overnight. You will decide when to push compute to the edge and when to centralize, balancing cost, latency, and reliability.
• • Scale the platform 1000× over the next three years—from millions of parts per year to millions per day—without ever dropping a message or violating our 99.99 % SLA. This means rethinking partitioning strategies, auto-scaling Kubernetes jobs, and multi-region replication long before the load arrives.
• • Establish gold-standard observability: wire every pipeline stage to Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog; define SLIs/SLOs that the entire company can see; and build self-healing automations that page humans only when creativity is required. You will lead blameless post-mortems and turn every incident into a permanent improvement.
• • Champion data quality and governance. Own schema registries, lineage graphs, and fine-grained access control so that mechanical engineers, finance analysts, and ML researchers can all trust the numbers. You will implement automated data-contract tests and partner with security to achieve SOC 2 and ITAR compliance.
• • Collaborate daily with fusion physicists, electrical engineers, supply-chain planners, and finance leaders to translate whiteboard sketches into production features. You will run design reviews, write architecture decision records (ADRs), and present quarterly roadmaps to the VP of Engineering and CTO.
• • Stay on the bleeding edge without bleeding the budget. Evaluate new data technologies (Delta Lake, DuckDB, Materialize, LLM-powered data assistants) in weekly spikes, then recommend the right tool for the job. You will run internal tech talks and mentor junior engineers through pair programming and code reviews.
• • Participate in a follow-the-sun on-call rotation (one week in six) to protect live production schedules. When an alert fires at 3 a.m., you will debug distributed traces, rollback bad deploys, and ship a fix before the next shift starts—then automate the problem away so it never wakes anyone again.
• • Drive continuous cost optimization. Use Terraform to spin up spot-instance Flink clusters for bursty ETL, then tear them down. Track every GB of blob storage with lifecycle policies and recommend archival or deletion based on regulatory needs.
• • Contribute to Helion’s open-source footprint. Whether it’s upstream patches to Iceberg or a custom Kafka connector for high-vacuum sensor data, your code will be shared with the broader fusion and manufacturing communities.