Staff Platform Engineer

Staff Platform Engineer

Palmetto is a leading clean tech company on a mission to accelerate the transition to a clean energy future. With a belief that consumers can have it all, we are an uncompromising energy company that makes coming clean a no brainer. Our award-winning technology platform empowers homeowners, businesses, and entrepreneurs to adopt renewable energy through simple, scalable, and innovative solutions. Operating at the intersection of B2B and D2C, we offer software, financial products, and services that drive real environmental impact—without compromising value. We deliver end-to-end solutions for whole home electrification that put clean energy within reach for all.

Our employees are our most valuable resource. We foster a promote-from-within culture that prioritizes talent development, career growth, and purpose-driven work. Palmetto offers a comprehensive benefits package—including unlimited PTO, medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid parental leave, retirement plans, and more—so you can have it all both personally and professionally. Palmetto prioritizes people, planet, and profit—backed by a culture that values collaboration, impact, and balance. Join us in building a brighter, cleaner world.

This position will be based in Charlotte, NC, Boston, MA or New York, NY.

This position will report to the VP, Data Intelligence.

Energy is one of the defining challenges and opportunities of our generation, and the companies that lead will be the ones that operationalize AI the fastest. Palmetto is building to be agent-first and machine-first: data, systems, and products designed for machines, models, and agents, not just people reading dashboards. The mandate is to take what is cutting edge today and make it our table stakes.

We are looking for a versatile, senior engineer to help build the services and infrastructure that make this real. You will build robust, containerized services that make data across many systems discoverable, governed, and usable by people, applications, and AI agents, bring new data into that ecosystem, and integrate it for the teams that rely on it.

This is a broad, hands-on role for someone who is fluent in data but is fundamentally a software and platform engineer, not a traditional data engineer focused on the warehouse. Priorities will shift as the business does, so we want someone who can move across services, data, infrastructure, governance, and AI tooling, and pick up whatever is next.

Success means agent-first and machine-first stop being aspirations and become how Palmetto operates by default: services, teams, and AI agents get the data they need, governed and reliable, wherever the business goes next. You help make the frontier our foundation, and put Palmetto at the front of an AI-native energy industry, on a challenge that defines our generation.

Strategic & Tactical

• Build and operate robust, containerized backend services and APIs (REST, GraphQL) that serve data from many systems.
• Integrate heterogeneous, multicloud data sources, and find, ingest, transform, and wrangle new datasets into clean, usable form.
• Build governed access to data: authentication, fine-grained authorization, audit, and policy enforcement.
• Design for machines first: expose data and capabilities to AI agents, services, and automated callers (for example, via MCP), so systems can act on data, not just people read it.
• Stand up and maintain metadata, cataloging, and lineage so data stays discoverable and trustworthy.
• Own services in production: CI/CD, observability, performance, reliability, and cost.
• Act as a hands-on technical and solutions-engineering partner for internal teams (and at times external ones) on integrations, including standing up data apps and visualizations that communicate data value to stakeholders.
• Support ML and AI workflows by making features and model outputs discoverable, governed, and servable.

Qualifications

Minimum:

• Senior-level experience (typically 6+ years) building and operating production backend services or platforms.
• Polyglot engineer with deep Python plus working JavaScript/TypeScript and SQL, and strong command-line skills (bash/zsh).
• Proven track record shipping robust, containerized microservices (FastAPI with Pydantic in Python, or NestJS on Fastify with Zod in TS), with typed API contracts over GraphQL and/or REST.
• Cloud infrastructure experience, ideally multicloud, across heterogeneous data estates.
• Fluency with the modern data stack as an integrator and for building data transformations (Snowflake, dbt, SQL, Airflow), plus open-source data tooling (DuckDB, Iceberg, and similar); comfortable wrangling messy data into usable form.
• Strong authentication and authorization knowledge; ideally hands-on with fine-grained authorization (FGA) as an operational enforcement capability in applications, across models such as ReBAC and ABAC.
• A DevOps and SRE sensibility (CI/CD, observability) and a working understanding of machine learning principles.
• An agentic, AI-forward builder and strong communicator who enjoys solutions engineering and can pivot as priorities change.

Preferred:

• Experience with data catalogs or metadata platforms and data governance.
• Experience building or integrating AI-agent interfaces (e.g., MCP).
• An eye for communicating data through data apps and visualizations. Information-design judgment matters more than any one tool (D3, charting or BI libraries, front-end frameworks, or directing AI tools to build them).
• Familiarity with GraphQL frameworks, Redis, secrets management, and Kubernetes.
• Experience sourcing or licensing third-party datasets.
• Genuine interest in clean energy and home electrification.

Employment is contingent upon the successful completion of a background check.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Palmetto embraces diversity and is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.