Senior OT Data 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.

Valar Atomics is developing high temperature gas cooled small modular reactors from first principles spanning early R&D through licensing, construction, and commissioning. The Senior OT Data Engineer will own the operational data architecture connecting industrial sources, historians, time-series databases, semantic models, visualization, and controlled downstream consumers across Valar's reactor, fuel, and power-conversion programs. This is a hands-on role spanning software, databases, storage, networking, cybersecurity boundaries, and field commissioning.

Your scope includes Factory Talk Historian SE/AVEVA PI, InfluxDB/SQL, OPC UA/MQTT/APIs, ETL/data pipelines, semantic data models, Grafana, virtualized data services, RAID/ZFS storage, backup/recovery, high-rate time-series data, data quality/lineage, and controlled transfer through air-gapped/unidirectional boundaries to enterprise/cloud systems.

You will work closely with the Senior SCADA Engineer, Senior OT Network Engineer, Senior OT Infrastructure Engineer, IC&E, Operations, Quality, and engineering users. The SCADA Engineer owns the Factory Talk platform and operator-facing SCADA environment; you own cross-system data pipelines/models/storage/controlled egress. IC&E owns field instrumentation, PLC application programming, protection logic, and electrical/control hardware. Data systems must preserve source timestamps/quality and cannot interfere with control or credited safety functions.

This role is shared across programs and requires frequent field work in Torrance and Orangeville. We expect candidates from power generation, oil & gas, process manufacturing, aerospace, industrial software, or other environments where data fidelity/availability/security matter.

• Own OT data architecture, standards, roadmaps, interfaces, naming/context, retention, and lifecycle across reactor, fuel, and power-conversion programs.
• Deploy/administer Factory Talk Historian SE/AVEVA PI, InfluxDB, SQL, virtualized data services, and supporting storage/backup/recovery infrastructure.
• Build/operate OPC UA/MQTT/API/ETL ingestion pipelines that preserve source timestamps, values, units, quality, ordering, and traceability.
• Develop semantic data models/metadata/tag context/material genealogy interfaces that make operational data consistently usable across teams.
• Design/validate controlled data transfer across security zones, air gaps, and unidirectional data flows to enterprise/cloud/central monitoring systems.
• Engineer time-series retention/compression/query performance/replication/high availability/recovery and validate failure behavior.
• Build Grafana/query/analysis interfaces with engineers/operators while keeping data ownership/access boundaries explicit.
• Develop/deploy C#/Power Shell/CMD services/scripts for acquisition/transformation/validation/monitoring and maintain controlled source/configuration records.
• Monitor data quality/pipeline health/storage capacity/access/audit and perform authorized cybersecurity testing/remediation for data systems.
• Lead integration/commissioning/troubleshooting/vendor escalation/turnover and maintain current diagrams, data contracts, manuals, and runbooks.

• You treat timestamps/quality/lineage/context as engineering data, not optional metadata.
• You can trace a bad value from the source interface through transport/transformation/storage/query/visualization and identify where it changed.
• You design data systems that remain decoupled from process control and cannot create a dependency on external/less-trusted systems.
• You can balance throughput/latency/retention/recovery/security without building unnecessary complexity.
• You test backup/restore/replay/failover/data-loss behavior and quantify limitations instead of assuming the platform is reliable.
• You create clear data contracts/models/diagrams/runbooks that other engineers can implement and operate.
• You take complete ownership before a mature data platform/team exists and can lead vendors without outsourcing technical judgment.
• You are willing to travel frequently and maintain a strong field presence during construction, commissioning, startup, outages, and incidents.

• Demonstrated ownership of industrial historian/time-series/data-integration systems in power generation, oil & gas, manufacturing,…