Senior OT Data Engineer at Valar Atomics
Torrance, CA
$170,000–$210,000
Jul 30, 2026
Torrance, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A hands-on Senior OT Data Engineer role at a startup building high-temperature gas-cooled small modular reactors. The position owns the full operational data architecture — historians, time-series databases, OPC UA/MQTT ingestion pipelines, semantic models, Grafana visualization, and controlled data transfer across air-gapped and unidirectional security boundaries — spanning reactor, fuel, and power-conversion programs. Frequent field work at both the Torrance, CA and Orangeville, UT sites is required.
Senior level · Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA · Full-time
Pay in the description: $170,000–$210,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 4 people in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 1–6
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $159,165 (middle half $121,760–$182,057). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 1, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The role is split across two physical sites: Torrance, CA (primary office) and Orangeville, UT (pilot plant). The CBSA is set to Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim based on the Torrance location, but candidates must be willing to travel frequently to rural Utah.
The posting explicitly states 'Formal degrees/certifications are not required. Equivalent technical experience is acceptable,' so the degree requirement is set to None.
FactoryTalk Historian SE and AVEVA PI are listed as a single requirement (the SE product is built on the PI foundation); they are captured as one skill with AVEVA PI as an alternative rather than two separate entries.
Proxmox, RAID, and ZFS are listed under Basic Qualifications with 'or equivalent' qualifiers — the requirement is for that virtualization/storage capability; Proxmox/ZFS/RAID are the named representatives.
SCADA, MES, LIMS, and QMS appear only under Preferred Skills and are marked accordingly.
SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role is primarily about building and owning data pipelines, historian/time-series infrastructure, and semantic data models (pointing toward 15-1243 Database Architects), but the heavy ETL/pipeline and OT-integration work also fits 15-1299 (Computer Occupations, All Other) given the industrial/OT specialization. 15-1243 was chosen as the primary because data architecture and storage design dominate the scope.
Read the full posting
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