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Valar Atomics is building scalable, factory-made advanced nuclear power systems to unlock abundant clean energy for industry, hydrogen production, and next-generation manufacturing. The company is constructing a pilot plant in Orangeville, Utah and is backed by Series A funding.
As Principal Software Engineer, you will own the technical architecture of Valar's entire software platform—the operating system that powers the company's reactor design, fuel manufacturing, licensing, and plant operations. This is a full-stack role spanning telemetry systems, streaming infrastructure, simulation platforms, and enterprise integration.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own end-to-end architecture across telemetry ingestion, streaming backbone, simulation platforms, and enterprise systems; make strategic build-versus-buy decisions shaping the platform for the next decade.
- Design and build high-volume telemetry ingestion for reactor test stands and fuel manufacturing, handling high-rate time-series data at scale with preserved source timestamps, units, quality, and ordering.
- Architect the streaming backbone (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, Flink, or similar) carrying operational data to analytics, simulation, monitoring, and enterprise consumers, engineered for throughput, backpressure, replay, and recovery.
- Support simulation and modeling platforms: campaign management, compute scheduling, and reproducible, traceable results defensible to regulators.
- Build full-stack services and web interfaces for engineers, operators, and technicians; integrate commercial systems (PLM, ERP, MES, document management) via REST, GraphQL, and event-driven interfaces.
- Design data models, interfaces, and access boundaries ensuring engineering, manufacturing, test, and quality records remain consistent, auditable, and usable across teams.
- Establish engineering practices for deployment, observability, testing, on-call, and software quality standards appropriate to a regulated environment.
- Lead design and code reviews, mentor engineers as the software organization grows, and set technical direction.
- Leverage AI coding agents and assistants as core tools, establishing verification standards for the team.
You will work directly with reactor engineers, fuel engineers, systems engineering, licensing, manufacturing, supply chain, and operations teams. The role is based in Torrance, California, with regular travel to the Orangeville, Utah pilot plant.
Required qualifications: 10+ years writing and deploying production software, including significant time as technical owner of a platform or major system. Demonstrated experience designing and operating high-volume telemetry or time-series systems (instrumentation, test, industrial, vehicle, or comparable). Experience with high-volume streaming and event-driven architectures. Background building or operating simulation, modeling, or scientific computing platforms. Experience building enterprise and engineering software with full-stack services and commercial system integration. Proficiency in both typed languages (Java, C#, Go, C++, Rust) and untyped languages (Python, JavaScript). Proven track record driving architecture and technical decisions across multiple teams. Working experience with cloud, containerized deployment, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD. Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals.
