
Full Stack Data Engineer - Internal Flight Data Applications
Palo Alto, CA at a glance
- Rent
- #2 of 51$3,050/mo+46% vs US avg
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- #17 of 51292 mild days0 hot · 0 cold
- Income tax
- #1 of 5113.3% top rateCalifornia
What you need
Tech
Experience
- 2+ yrs web applications
Education
- BS in Computer Science
What you'll do
- Build internal flight data apps
- Develop Python backend services
- Build front-end data interfaces
- Build AI-assisted diagnosis tooling
About the Job
Flight data from across our aircraft fleet feeds a central data platform that engineering teams rely on to understand how the aircraft perform. Pivotal is seeking a Full Stack Data Engineer to build the internal applications that put that data directly in engineers' hands, so teams across the company can explore it and answer their own questions.
You will work across the whole stack — backend services over the data platform, web front ends that make large datasets explorable, dashboards, AI-assisted tooling that helps engineers interpret what they are looking at, and the packaging that puts analysis tools on an engineer's laptop. Your users sit down the hall, and requirements arrive as a conversation with someone who needs an answer rather than as a written spec, so this role is as much about understanding the question as it is about shipping the tool. It suits an engineer early in their career who wants ownership of real products and direct contact with the people building and flying the aircraft.
Responsibilities
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Internal applications: Build and maintain the internal web applications engineers use to work with flight data — flight record browsers, query interfaces, and analysis tools over the warehouse.
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Backend services: Develop Python services and HTTP APIs that query Athena and S3 and return results at interactive speed, including pagination and caching over large result sets.
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Front end: Build interfaces that make large telemetry datasets explorable — sortable tables, filters, and time-series plots — for engineers who are never going to write SQL.
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AI-assisted diagnosis: Build agent-based tooling over the data platform so engineers can ask questions in plain language and follow a symptom through to a root cause without hand-writing queries. Design these tools to return the underlying data and how it was derived, not just an answer, so an engineer can verify the result before acting on it.
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Self-serve analysis: Turn recurring one-off analyses from the firmware, GNC, battery, and maintenance teams into supported, self-serve tools instead of scripts that only their author can run.
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Data catalog: Generate the internal field guide and data catalog from the warehouse itself, so what engineers read cannot drift from what the tables actually contain — and keep that metadata machine-readable, so the tooling and agents built on top of it interpret results correctly.
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Alert review: Build the review and triage surfaces for fleet health alerts — acknowledgment, history, and trend views — alongside the existing dashboards and Slack notifications.
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Tooling distribution: Package and distribute analysis tooling so it runs on an engineer's laptop, Windows included, without someone walking them through an environment setup.
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Ownership: Carry your work through deployment — tests, code review, CI/CD, and the monitoring that tells you when something breaks.
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Collaboration: Sit with the engineering teams to scope what they actually need, and document what you ship so the next person can support it.
Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
- AWS experience, particularly S3, Athena, Lambda, or API Gateway
- Worked with large or time-series datasets, and knows how to keep a UI responsive over millions of rows
- Charting and data visualization libraries; Grafana dashboard development
- Docker, and infrastructure as code with Terraform
- Has built with LLM APIs or agent frameworks — tool use, retrieval over structured data, and evaluating whether the output can be trusted
- Has built internal tools where the users are colleagues rather than customers
Familiarity/experience with one or more of the following:
- Aerospace, automotive, or robotics telemetry, and flight or vehicle test data
- Packaging desktop or command-line tooling for non-developer users, including on Windows
- Authentication and access control for internal applications (SSO, IAM, scoped credentials)
- Regulated or safety-critical environments with traceability and data retention requirements
- Natural-language or conversational interfaces over structured, time-series, or diagnostic data
- Interest in RC planes, quadcopters, or aviation
Attributes aligned with Core Values
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About Pivotal Future
Positive actions and investments for nature have been held back by scarcity of real data, inaccurate models, and the absence of analysis tools to easily generate meaningful insights. That’s where we come in. We provide real and actionable nature intelligence to reveal risks, build resilience and drive competitive advantage. Proud recipient of the 2024 World Economic Forum "Top Innovator" for building the most promising solutions that drive progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
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