Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer, Flight Data

About the company

We're partnering with an aviation technology startup building software for airport ground operations. Their platform helps airlines, airports and ground handlers coordinate every aircraft turnaround, and all of it starts with flight data: schedules, real-time status, gate and stand assignments, and arrival and departure times, ingested from airlines, airports and data providers.

The role

Their flight data ingestion system has become too important to run without a dedicated owner. They're hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Flight Data to take full ownership of it: how flight data gets in, how accurate and timely it is, and how it scales as they add airports and customers.

This is a software engineering role first. You'll build and run production systems, and you'll ship product code alongside the rest of the Los Angeles-based engineering team when that's what moves the company forward. You'll also work the way the team works: directing AI coding agents to move fast, while bringing the judgment to know when their output is wrong.

What you'll do

• Own the flight data ingestion system end to end: architecture, code, uptime and roadmap.
• Build and maintain integrations with flight data sources: airline and airport feeds, commercial providers and industry message formats.
• Normalize and reconcile flight data across sources: match flights, resolve conflicting times and statuses, and handle schedule changes, diversions and cancellations.
• Make the data reliable in real time. Set up monitoring, alerting, and latency and accuracy checks, and be on point when a feed breaks on a busy day.
• Model flight and operational data for products and analytics, with clear schemas, contracts and documentation.
• Ship full-stack product work (APIs, services, and frontend when needed) alongside the core engineering team.
• Use AI coding agents as a daily force multiplier: scope tasks for them, review their output critically, and own what ships.
• Onboard new airports' and customers' data quickly as the company grows, and make that process repeatable.

What we're looking for

• 6+ years as a software engineer, with at least 3 building and operating data pipelines in production.
• Experience ingesting real-time, messy external data feeds, ideally flight data (schedules and status from airlines, airports or providers like FlightAware, Cirium or OAG).
• A real software engineering foundation: you write tested, maintainable code, use version control and CI/CD, do code review, and have been on call for systems you built.
• Strong Python and SQL. Experience with another backend language (TypeScript, Go or similar) is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven and streaming systems (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub or similar), plus a production database or warehouse (Postgres, Snowflake, BigQuery).
• Cloud infrastructure experience on AWS or GCP, including infrastructure as code and containers.
• Comfort working across the stack: building APIs and services, and picking up frontend work when the team needs it.
• Fluency with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar) as part of how you build, not an experiment.
• An ownership mindset: you want a system that's yours, and you don't need a ticket for every task.

Nice to have

• Aviation industry experience at an airline, airport, ground handler or aviation tech company, including standards like SSIM, AIDX, ACARS, ADS-B or FAA SWIM.
• IoT, vehicle or sensor telemetry from ground equipment or airside operations.
• Experience with geospatial or time-series data, such as aircraft positions, airport layouts, or arrival and departure predictions.
• Early-stage startup experience as one of the first data hires.

Location

Los Angeles, CA. Full-time.