- Robot type
- Drone · Defense
- Location
- San DiegoCaliforniaUSA
- Job type
- Business Operations
- Posted
- Aug 25, 2026
- Salary
- $150,000–$230,000 a year
Staff Engineer, Data Platform (R5659)
Job description
We are looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to help define and build the data foundation of the AI Factory.
The Data Platform provides a unifying, knowledge-graph-centered API layer for human and agentic workflows. It connects configurations, requirements, software versions, test executions, files, signals, training data, and results through stable identities and typed relationships. It also provides consistent access to the storage and compute systems behind those data products.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will design platform architecture, implement production software, evaluate storage and compute technologies, establish data-modeling patterns, and work…
Job responsibilities
- Develop a unifying Graph API: Lead the architecture and implementation of the knowledge graph and multi-modal API layer that serves as the backbone for human, service, and agentic workflows.
- Own DataOps infrastructure: Research, optimize, and maintain the storage, indexing, query, ingestion, and compute infrastructure used throughout the data lifecycle.
- Establish best-practices: Establish durable, best-practice patterns for schema modeling, relationships, lineage, and schema evolution.
- Turbocharge agentic data access: Build APIs that enable agents to retrieve structured, connected, and explainable context rather than relying only on keyword or vector similarity.
- Develop reference architectures: Establish recommended storage and compute profiles, deployment patterns, benchmarks, and operational guidance for both internal and customer-managed infrastructure.
- Advise downstream teams: Partner directly with autonomy, ML, test, infrastructure, product, and customer-facing teams to turn real workflows into reusable platform capabilities from modeling to integrations.
- Build first-party integrations: Deliver integrations that make important data easy to collect and aggregate, including data produced by simulations, test infrastructure, training systems, and edge devices.
- Improve developer experience: Create self-service APIs, SDKs, tools, examples, and diagnostics that make correct data modeling and ingestion the easiest path.
Job requirements
- Significant experience designing and operating distributed data solutions, storage systems, or data-intensive backend services.
- Strong software engineering skills and a record of delivering production systems in languages such as Go and Python.
- Deep understanding of data modeling, API design, schema evolution, identity, consistency, indexing, query planning, and data lifecycle concerns.
- Experience working across multiple storage modalities, such as relational or graph databases, object storage, analytical or columnar systems, and file storage.
- Experience designing reliable ingestion and access paths for high-volume or operationally important data.
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes, Linux, networking, security, storage, observability, and distributed-systems fundamentals.
- Experience deploying data infrastructure across cloud or customer-managed environments using modern Infrastructure as Code and platform engineering practices.
- Ability to evaluate technologies through prototypes, benchmarks, operational requirements, and total lifecycle cost rather than feature lists alone.
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