Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></p></div><h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What You’ll Do:</strong></span></h3> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">As a<strong> </strong>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:</span></p> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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).</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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).</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Design and maintain observability infrastructure</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Collaborate with AI experts to get their systems deployed into production.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Consider what we’ve built that might help and solve problems other teams at Archer may have</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Mentor and guide junior team members with diverse technical backgrounds, fostering a culture of engineering excellence and software development best practices.</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What You Need: </strong></span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Kubernetes, Docker, GitOps (Argo CD)</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Layer 7 mesh networks (e.g. Linkerd or Istio), load balancers, East/West and North/South hot failovers, etc</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Infrastructure as Code tooling (we use OpenTofu and Ansible)</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Secrets management</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Distributed tracing and observability stacks</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Cost optimization and designing portable cloud-agnostic architectures</span></li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Bonus Qualifications: </strong></span></h3> <ul> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Software Development: Rust, Python (NumPy, PyTorch, etc)</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Data Engineering: Postgres, Parquet, Iceberg, Spark, etc</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Full-stack from cloud software development to mobile IoT. UX ideas on what makes good interfaces a plus, but <em><strong>minimal to no</strong></em> front-end experience needed.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Network engineering: Anycast, WireGuard, BGP, etc.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Security: defense in depth principles, zero trust design, software supply chain attacks, etc.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Message brokers experience (e.g. Kafka or NATS)</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">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</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">At Archer we aim to attract, retain, and motivate…