Senior Software Engineer, Backend at Archer in San Jose, CA

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.

What You’ll Do:

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Archer, you will architect, develop, and scale the core services and infrastructure that power our cutting-edge AI products. You will take significant vertical technical ownership of complex problems in different areas. Some examples of things you could be involved in:

• Design and maintain scalable infrastructure for managing a fleet of IoT sensors and related infrastructure (i.e. highly robust progressive OTA which requires writing Rust code and deploying infrastructure to manage that process).
• Eventually building infrastructure and processes to target an SLO of 8 9s of availability (315 ms of downtime a year doesn’t come from on-call practices).
• Design and maintain observability infrastructure
• Collaborate with AI experts to get their systems deployed into production.
• Consider what we’ve built that might help and solve problems other teams at Archer may have
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code
• Mentor and guide junior team members with diverse technical backgrounds, fostering a culture of engineering excellence and software development best practices.

What You Need:

• Kubernetes, Docker, GitOps (Argo CD)
• Layer 7 mesh networks (e.g. Linkerd or Istio), load balancers, East/West and North/South hot failovers, etc
• Infrastructure as Code tooling (we use OpenTofu and Ansible)
• Secrets management
• Distributed tracing and observability stacks
• Cost optimization and designing portable cloud-agnostic architectures

Bonus Qualifications:

• Software Development: Rust, Python (NumPy, PyTorch, etc)
• Data Engineering: Postgres, Parquet, Iceberg, Spark, etc
• Full-stack from cloud software development to mobile IoT. UX ideas on what makes good interfaces a plus, but minimal to no front-end experience needed.
• Network engineering: Anycast, WireGuard, BGP, etc.
• Security: defense in depth principles, zero trust design, software supply chain attacks, etc.
• Message brokers experience (e.g. Kafka or NATS)

Please note that this job description is intended to provide a general overview of the position and does not include an exhaustive list of responsibilities and qualifications

At Archer we aim to attract, retain, and motivate talent that possess the skills and leadership necessary to grow our business. We drive a pay-for-performance culture and reward performance that supports the Company’s business strategy. For this position we are targeting a base pay between $144,000.00 - $180,000.00. Actual compensation offered will be determined by factors such as job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Archer is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusivity in the workplace. All aspects of employment are decided on the basis of merit, qualifications, and business needs. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Archer is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to job applicants with physical or mental disabilities, and those with sincerely held religious beliefs. Applicants who may require reasonable accommodation for any part of the application or hiring process should provide their name and contact information to Archer’s People Team at people@archer.com. Reasonable accommodations will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

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Archer is unable to provide work visa sponsorship for this position at the present time.

Archer is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusivity in the workplace. All aspects of employment are decided on the basis of merit, qualifications, and business needs. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Archer Aviation does not engage with external recruiting agencies/individual recruiters with whom it does not have a prior written agreement. Archer reserves the right to make use of any unsolicited resumes that it receives and bears no responsibility for payment of any fees asserted from the use of unsolicited resumes. If you are a recruiting agency or individual recruiter wishing to do business with Archer, please reach out to People@archer.com. All employment processes are managed by the Archer People Team.