Staff DevOps Engineer | Real-Time AI Infra & Backend

Archer Aviation; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 237,000; Full time

Job summary

Archer Aviation in San Jose, CA is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to architect, develop, and scale core services, real-time data pipelines, and distributed infrastructure powering our AI products. You will bridge AI models with production-ready systems to ensure high-throughput, low-latency streaming.

You will collaborate with AI Research, Engineering, and Data Science, own the full lifecycle from design to deployment, improve observability, and mentor teammates in DevOps best practices.

Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience focusing on backend systems and distributed architectures.
• Strong proficiency in Java, Python and/or Rust, with high-performance concurrent backend coding.
• Production experience with stream-processing frameworks, specifically Apache Flink.
• Experience setting up observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK).
• Solid experience with Docker, Kubernetes, including networking, storage, and auto-scaling.
• Deep experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and IaC tools like OpenTofu/Terraform and Ansible.
• Hands-on experience with GitOps (Argo CD) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, and high-throughput data storage strategies.
• Able to scale yourself with AI coding assistants while owning code and infrastructure.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to explain complex infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain highly available backend systems, distributed data pipelines, and scalable cloud infrastructure to support real-time AI applications.
• Leverage IaC and cloud-native tooling to manage production, staging, and development environments.
• Build and manage stream-processing jobs handling global, high-frequency data with ultra-low latency.
• Collaborate with AI Research, Engineering, and Data Science teams to containerize, deploy, and monitor scalable ML models and infrastructure.
• Own the full development lifecycle—from design and provisioning to deployment, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Maximize system performance, observability, and reliability; respond to production issues with root-cause analysis and blameless post-mortems.
• Mentor and guide team members, fostering DevOps culture and best practices.

Skills

Java

Python

Rust

Backend systems

Distributed architectures

Cloud platforms

Terraform/OpenTofu

Ansible

Kubernetes

GitOps

CI/CD pipelines

PostgreSQL

Redis

Flink

Observability

Argo CD

Docker

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform/OpenTofu

Ansible

Argo CD

Grafana

Prometheus

ELK

OpenTofu/Terraform

GitOps tooling

PostgreSQL

Redis

Flink

Job description

Archer Aviation in San Jose, CA is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to architect, develop, and scale core services, real-time data pipelines, and distributed infrastructure powering our AI products. You will bridge AI models with production-ready systems to ensure high-throughput, low-latency streaming.

You will collaborate with AI Research, Engineering, and Data Science, own the full lifecycle from design to deployment, improve observability, and mentor teammates in DevOps best practices.