Data & Storage Engineer
Do Apply if you:
- In your free time you build your technical skills via personal projects
- Are very passionate about technology, security, and/or power generation
- Get excited getting to learn and not discouraged by your ignorance
- Able to work effectively with only the end goal provided
- Comfortable saying when something is unrealistic or a problem immediately
- Able to start work prior to Jan 31st, 2026
- Can work on-site 5-7 days a week in Hawthorne, CA
- Comfortable with frequent travel to our reactor site in Orangeville, UT
(Guaranteed travel in February 2026)
DON’T Apply if you:
- Require a standard Monday to Friday 9-5 working day
- Are unwilling to be working weekends and nights
- Are not authorized to work in the United States (we do not sponsor)
- Are not eligible to access controlled technical information under applicable U.S. export control regulations (e.g., DOE 10 CFR Part 810); eligibility will be verified.
About the role
You’ll be a member of a small, high-impact IT team at Valar Atomics, focused on building and operating the systems that capture, store, and make operational data usable across the company, especially for our reactor and test operations. This is a fully on-site role in Hawthorne, CA and will require occasional travel as needed. The job centers on (1) full-stack data handling (collection → storage → integrity → duplication → visualization) and (2) close collaboration with Instrumentation & Control to ensure data from OT/industrial systems is usable, reliable, and accessible for engineering and operations.
What you’ll do
• Own data pipelines end-to-end: ingest, normalize, store, validate, and present data for engineering and operations use.
• Operate and evolve observability/data tooling such as Gravwell (or similar SIEM), Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf, and related telemetry sources (SNMP/Syslog/Pcap/Windows Event Log/etc).
• Build and maintain dashboards for operations, engineering, and troubleshooting: clean visuals, accurate metrics, and usable drill-down.
• Ensure data integrity: schema/retention planning, validation, backup/restore testing, and preventing silent data loss/corruption.
• Implement and maintain unidirectional duplication/replication of databases where required (designing for safety, separation, and reliability).
• Manage storage systems supporting data workloads: ZFS, HBAs, RAID, capacity planning, performance tuning, and failure recovery.
• Support Azure VM-based workloads related to data storage, ingestion, and visualization services.
• Work with packetized data and network telemetry when troubleshooting ingest issues (basic packet capture, decoding, and tracing).
• Document systems, runbooks, and operational procedures (SOPs), with an emphasis on repeatability and reliability.
• (Optional / nice to have) Integrate with or support Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Historian environments if/when present.
What you bring
• Hands-on experience operating production data systems across both storage and visualization/analysis layers.
• Experience with time-series and telemetry pipelines (InfluxDB + Telegraf or equivalent).
• Dashboarding and visualization experience (Grafana or similar), including building usable views for non-specialists.
• Strong storage fundamentals, ideally with ZFS and direct-attached storage concepts (HBAs/RAID), including recovery workflows.
• Ability to reason about data integrity and reliability: retention, backups, validation, replication, and failure modes.
• Comfort working with log/telemetry sources like Syslog, SNMP, Windows Event Logs, and packet captures.
• Basic understanding of networks and packetized data (enough to debug ingest/transport issues end-to-end).
• Ability to plan, communicate, prioritize, and deliver scoped projects with minimal oversight.
• Strong documentation habits: clear runbooks, diagrams where needed, and change logging.
Who you are
• A builder/operator: you like owning systems in production and making them reliable.
• Data-driven and practical—you measure, validate, and don’t hand-wave.
• Comfortable working cross-functionally with IT, Instrumentation & Control, and operations stakeholders.
• Calm under pressure when data pipelines break and people need answers.
• Biased toward simple, robust systems over fragile complexity.
Nice-to-haves
• Gravwell experience (or another SIEM/log analytics stack).
• Experience with OT-adjacent data collection (industrial networks/controls telemetry, historians, segmented environments).
• FactoryTalk Historian familiarity.
• Automation/scripting to reduce toil and improve reliability.
• Experience designing one-way data flows / replication patterns for safety or segmentation constraints.
Working with us
• Small team, real ownership, direct impact on safety-critical operations.
• Close collaboration with Instrumentation & Control and the broader engineering org.
• Catered lunches
• Competitive pay