Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

About Helion

We are a fusion power company based in Everett, WA, with the mission to build the world's first fusion power plant, enabling a future with unlimited clean electricity. Our vision is a world with clean, reliable, and affordable energy for everyone.

Since Helion's founding in 2013, we have raised $1.5 billion from long-time investors such as Sam Altman, Mithril, and Capricorn Investment Group as well as new investors including Thrive Capital, LightSpeed Venture Capital, SoftBank, and others to propel us forward. Our current prototype, Polaris, has reached record-breaking plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius (13 keV). Helion is continuing to iterate and on the path to the world's first fusion power plant, Orion.

This is a pivotal time to join Helion. You will tackle real-world challenges with a team that prizes urgency, rigor, ownership, and a commitment to delivering hard truths – values essential to achieving what no one has before. Together, we will change the future of energy, because the world can't wait.

What you will be doing

You will design, develop, and operate a secure, scalable, reliable, and efficient platform to facilitate the flow of data between internal and external systems supporting mechanical and electrical engineering, supply chain, inventory, manufacturing, and finance. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role: together with a cross-functional team owning business critical applications, you will multiply the impact of many other teams across the company. 

You will:

• Design and develop large-scale, batch and real-time data pipelines, ELT processes, data warehouses, and data lakes, both on prem and in the cloud

• Scale our data platform to support operational growth from millions of parts per year to millions per day

• Monitor and continuously improve the performance and reliability of data connections and their impact on up-and-downstream systems, using best-in-class observability tools

• Ensure data quality and governance by managing metadata like schemas, lineage, and access control

• Collaborate with other software engineers, data analysts and scientists, other engineering disciplines, non-engineers, leadership, and vendors to understand data requirements and deliver solutions

• Stay current with emerging data technologies while recommending battle-tested right-fit solutions that align with strategic goals

• Participate in on-call rotations to maintain our SLA with the rest of the company, and prevent data issues from stalling 24/7 production schedules

Required Skills:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field

• 8+ years of software and/or data engineering experience building and operating large-scale, distributed data systems

• Hands-on experience with modern data storage and processing technologies (e.g., Kafka, Postgres, blob storage, Flink, dbt, Iceberg)

• Expertise in Python and SQL; experience with other languages like Java, Scala, or Go

• Cloud-native experience in Azure, AWS, and/or Google Cloud, using container orchestration technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform

• Familiar with DevOps best practices, using version control (Git), CI/CD (e.g., Buildkite, GitHub Actions), and monitoring and alerting (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)

• Experience with AI/ML, including LLMs and MCP servers

#LI-Onsite #LI-KL1

Benefits

Our total compensation package includes benefits, including but not limited to:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision plans for employees and their families

• 31 Days of PTO (21 vacation days and 10 sick days)

• 10 Paid holidays, plus company-wide winter break

• Up to 5% employer 401(k) match

• Short term disability, long term disability, and life insurance

• Paid parental leave and support (up to 16 weeks)

• Annual wellness stipend

Helion is an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. If you need assistance or an accommodation during the interview process, please let us know.