Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

Sr Software Engineer, Data PlatformWe are seeking a Sr Software Engineer, Data Platform for an early stage Space/Defense start up client in LA. We need someone with 5+ years of experience building production software across backend, frontend, and data-heavy systems who has deep experience with video processing pipelines, signal processing at scale, and microservices architecture. You should be comfortable building your own solutions (rather than relying on off-the-shelf tools), leveraging AI to accelerate your work, and thriving in a fast-paced startup where you'll touch nearly every part of the stack. Bonus points if you have ML experience or have worked at an AI training data platform like Scale AI, Mercor, Surge AI, or Appen.What you'll do:Build high-throughput video processing pipelines including transcoding, HLS packaging, depth-map rendering, frame-accurate synchronization, and GPU-accelerated media workflows at scaleTake ownership of ingestion and processing pipelines for video, 3D assets, depth maps, telemetry, annotations, metadata, and model-generated signalsDesign and build event-driven workloads on Kafka and Kubernetes that move data through capture, processing, enrichment, QA, packaging, and deliveryBuild AI enrichment systems for scoring, metadata extraction, classification, quality review, redundancy detection, and dataset recommendationsBuild internal applications for capture teams, reviewers, operators, and data managers to track, inspect, improve, and assemble datasetsBuild customer-facing marketplace tools where AI labs can search, preview, evaluate, query, purchase, and receive datasetsDesign data models behind provenance, asset versioning, licensing state, QA state, delivery history, analytics, and customer entitlementsBuild monitoring and analytics to understand quality, throughput, bottlenecks, customer behavior, and dataset valueTech stackPython, FastAPI, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS, FFmpeg, Django