Staff DevOps Engineer

Archer is an aerospace and defense company headquartered in San Jose, California, building the aircraft and technology that will define the next era of flight. The company works across air taxis, UAS, AI and powertrain development - building real-world systems that combine software intelligence with physical hardware. That includes Midnight, Archer's all-electric air taxi; Halo, an autonomous vertical takeoff and landing aircraft built for both commercial and defense use; and ZEE, Archer's AI foundation model built specifically for aviation. We're seeking exceptional engineers, operators and builders to join us on our mission to build the future of aerospace and defense.

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 Staff DevOps Engineer, you will architect, develop, and scale the core services, real-time data pipelines, and distributed infrastructure that power our cutting-edge AI products. You will bridge the gap between complex AI models and production-ready systems, ensuring that our high-throughput, real-time data streaming environment is reliable, secure, and infinitely scalable.

• Architect and maintain highly available backend systems, distributed data pipelines, and scalable cloud infrastructure to support real-time AI applications.
• Leverage infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and cloud-native tooling to build, manage, and optimize our production, staging, and development environments.
• Build and manage stream-processing jobs capable of handling global, high-frequency data streams with ultra-low latency.
• Work cross-functionally with AI Research, Engineering, and Data Science teams to containerize, deploy, orchestrate, and monitor scalable ML models and infrastructure.
• Own the full development lifecycle-from system design and infrastructure provisioning to deployment, proactive monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Maximize system performance, observability, and reliability; respond to high-priority production issues with advanced debugging, root cause analysis, and blameless post-mortems.
• Mentor and guide team members, fostering an engineering culture centered around DevOps practices, automation, and distributed systems best practices.

What You Need

• BS/MS/PhD degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with a heavy focus on backend systems, distributed architectures, and infrastructure management.
• Strong proficiency in Java, Python and/or Rust, with a solid grasp of writing high-performance, concurrent backend code.
• Production experience with stream-processing frameworks, specifically Apache Flink.
• Experience setting up observability stacks (eg Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, etc.)
• Solid experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), including configuring network policies, storage, and auto-scaling.
• Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tools such as OpenTofu/Terraform and Ansible.
• Hands-on experience with modern GitOps practices (e.g., Argo CD) and managing CI/CD automation pipelines.
• Solid experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), in-memory datastores (e.g., Valkey/Redis), and high-throughput data storage strategies.
• Able to scale yourself with AI coding assistants while still fully understanding and taking absolute ownership of all code and infrastructure configurations you commit.
• Excellent communication skills, with a proven ability to design resilient architectures and explain complex infrastructure paradigms to the broader team.

Bonus Qualifications

• Deep experience with Apache Pulsar (or Kafka) handling high-throughput, event-driven streaming architectures.
• Rust experience with async runtimes (Tokio) and message-driven architectures.
• Experience architecting real-time media pipelines using WebRTC (LiveKit, RealtimeKit) with a focus on server-side jitter buffering and network impairment handling.
• Deep understanding of audio codecs, specifically optimizing server-side Opus encoding/decoding for CPU efficiency and low-latency distribution.
• Familiarity with MLOps frameworks, GPU orchestration in Kubernetes, and serving LLMs at scale.
• Background in high-availability, real-time systems, telecommunications, or safety-critical networks.
• Prior experience or a deep interest in aerospace, aviation, or autonomous tracking systems.

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 $190,000 - $237,000. 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 View email address on click.appcast.io. Reasonable accommodations will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Information collected and processed as part of any job applications you choose to submit is subject to Archer's Candidate Privacy Policy.
Certain positions may be eligible for visa sponsorship.
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 View email address on click.appcast.io. All employment processes are managed by the Archer People Team.