Data & Storage Engineer

About Valar Atomics

At Valar Atomics, we're redefining what's possible in energy. Our mission is to make clean, high-temperature nuclear power scalable—unlocking abundant energy for industry, hydrogen, and next-generation manufacturing. We are a team of builders, engineers, and operators who believe nuclear energy should be fast to deploy, factory-made, and built for the real world. Our first pilot plant in Orangeville, Utah will demonstrate how advanced nuclear systems and fuel fabrication can power the future. Joining Valar Atomics means becoming part of a company where autonomy, ownership, and impact exist at every level.

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. The role centers on full-stack data handling (collection, storage, integrity, duplication, visualization) and close collaboration with Instrumentation & Control to ensure data from OT and industrial systems is reliable, usable, and accessible for engineering and operations. This is a fully on-site role in Hawthorne, CA, with occasional travel to our reactor site in Orangeville, UT.

Key Responsibilities

• Own data pipelines end-to-end: ingest, normalize, store, validate, and present data for engineering and operations use.
• Operate and evolve observability and 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 through schema and retention planning, validation, backup and restore testing, and preventing silent data loss or corruption.
• Implement and maintain unidirectional duplication and 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, including basic packet capture, decoding, and tracing.
• Document systems, runbooks, and SOPs with an emphasis on repeatability and reliability.
• Integrate with and support Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Historian environments where present.

You Will Be Successful in This Role If

• You're a builder and operator who likes owning systems in production and making them reliable.
• You're data-driven and practical—you measure, validate, and don't hand-wave.
• You collaborate effectively across IT, Instrumentation & Control, and operations stakeholders.
• You stay calm under pressure when data pipelines break and people need answers.
• You bias toward simple, robust systems over fragile complexity.
• You communicate clearly and early when something is unrealistic or a problem.
• You build your technical skills through personal projects and are energized by learning.

Basic Qualifications

• Hands-on experience operating production data systems across both storage and visualization/analysis layers.
• Experience with time-series and telemetry pipelines (InfluxDB and 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 and telemetry sources like Syslog, SNMP, Windows Event Logs, and packet captures.
• Working understanding of networks and packetized data—enough to debug ingest and 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.
• Eligible to access controlled technical information under applicable U.S. export control regulations (e.g., DOE 10 CFR Part 810); eligibility will be verified.
• Based in or willing to relocate to Hawthorne, CA.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Gravwell experience, or another SIEM/log analytics stack.
• Experience with OT-adjacent data collection (industrial networks and controls telemetry, historians, segmented environments).
• FactoryTalk Historian familiarity.
• Automation and scripting experience to reduce toil and improve reliability.
• Experience designing one-way data flows or replication patterns for safety or segmentation constraints.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Valar Atomics is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected status under applicable law.

We are committed to providing a workplace free of discrimination and harassment and will provide reasonable accommodation as required by law.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States as a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (green card holder).