Founding Data & Infra Engineer

About the job

We're emerging from stealth.  We're building an industrial data foundry — sensor connectivity,  real-time data pipelines, and AI for the systems that actually run manufacturing, energy, and critical infrastructure.

We're hiring our first backend and data infrastructure engineer. You'll own the data layer end to end — pipelines, ETL, edge connectivity, security, and infrastructure. Founder-level responsibility from day one.

You will work alongside engineers and leaders from ABB, Siemens, and Palantir.  Autonomous driving engineers from Audi and Volvo. Researchers from  Harvard and MIT.

What you've done

• Built  heavy data pipelines and ETL systems in production — terabytes of  streaming and batch data, strict requirements on correctness, latency,  and time alignment
• Worked with messy real-world data sources:  industrial sensors, time series, video, audio, LiDAR, geospatial — not  just clean relational tables
• Owned infrastructure and DevOps at a startup. CI/CD, IaC, containers, keeping production running. You were the person on call
• Done  hands-on security engineering. Threat modeling, secrets management,  network segmentation, compliance — not as a checklist but because the  systems you built required it
• Been an early hire or first engineer somewhere and built something from scratch that went to production and stayed there

What you'll own

• Data  pipeline architecture from edge sensors through ingestion,  transformation, fusion, and delivery into analytics and AI workloads —  including multimodal sources like video, audio, and LiDAR alongside  traditional telemetry
• ETL tooling with versioning,  orchestration, and data quality enforcement so new sources can be  onboarded without rebuilding from scratch every time
• Streaming  and real-time infrastructure including event-driven systems,  edge-to-cloud sync, offline buffering, and latency guarantees set by  operational physics
• All DevOps: CI/CD, IaC, container orchestration, edge deployment, cloud GPU provisioning
• Security  across the stack: hardening, access control, secrets, scanning, audit  logging, and compliance for systems that run mission-critical industrial  operations
• Observability and production ops for a distributed system spanning cloud, edge, and enterprise integrations

Who you are

• Strong across data engineering, DevOps, and security — you've actually done all three, not just listed them on a resume
• Experienced with Kafka, Spark, Flink, Airflow, dbt, or equivalent and pragmatic about tool selection
• Comfortable with data that doesn't come in neat rows — sensor streams, point clouds, video, time series
• Think about security as part of system design, not something you add later
• Care about data quality, schema discipline, and pipeline reliability because you've been burned when those things slip
• Want  to own something fully and build it right. Not looking for a job —  looking for the thing you pour yourself into for the next several years

Offer Details

• Full-time contractor or full-time employment, depending on the country
• Remote only, full-time dedication (40 hours/week)
• 8 hours of overlap with PST
• Competitive compensation package.
• Opportunities for professional growth and career development.
• Dynamic and inclusive work environment focused on innovation and teamwork