Senior Software Engineer

Company Overview

Lydian is developing the lowest cost sustainable fuels from waste CO2, water, and renewable electricity to decarbonize the aviation industry. Our breakthrough technology replaces oil and gas refining with fully electrified, modular, and flexible reactor systems that produce fuel with 95% lower emissions than traditional jet fuel.

Since our founding in 2021, Lydian has achieved key milestones in record time, including the production of our first liquid fuel from our pilot system, capable of producing ~10,000 gallons of fuel per year for a fraction of the capital and time of alternative approaches. Lydian is backed by top climate investors including Congruent Ventures, Galvanize Climate Solutions, Union Square Ventures, Voyager Ventures, Grok Ventures, and Overture. We are building a motivated, diverse, and collaborative team that is passionate about addressing the growing climate crisis and is committed to excellence in their work. In particular, we look for tenacious people who are energized by solving the hardest, highest impact problems that come their way.

Position Overview

Lydian is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and own the software and data systems to support and connect our technology development and commercial efforts. Our teams develop materials, run chemical reactors, and manufacture reactor components on a pilot line. Every experiment and part generates data: sensor time series from reactors and test stands, QC measurements, material lots, and process records. Connecting raw material properties, manufacturing history, reactor performance, and our technoeconomic modeling into a shared software and data platform is essential to accelerating development as we scale toward commercial production.

As our dedicated software engineer, you will work directly with chemists, materials scientists, and process and mechanical engineers to translate their needs into software tools they rely on. In a lean startup environment without dedicated IT or database administration, you will own these systems end to end, from architecture and implementation through deployment and ongoing operation. We favor simple, reliable solutions and prefer open-source tools and building in-house over buying expensive software unless it clearly pays off.

Your primary focus will be building reliable software and data systems. One of your first projects will focus on building new data storage systems for R&D and manufacturing, including integrating data from new manufacturing equipment and external suppliers and supporting ERP selection as we scale. Your systems will also enable data analysis and the integration of data from laboratory test stands. We use AI coding tools heavily across the team and want someone with the engineering fundamentals and judgment to establish practical standards for architecture, testing, and maintainability.

This role is based onsite in Charlestown, MA and requires in-person collaboration five days per week.

Responsibilities

• Own our software and data systems. Build databases, services, and data-entry tools that trace materials, parts, and assemblies through manufacturing and QC to reactor test results, integrating with existing tools such as Nominal and Notion.

• Build reliable pipelines and instrument integrations. Bring data collected from our test equipment and manual entry into a central database, with validation that keeps it clean, consistent, and easy to visualize and query.

• Enable analysis and visualization. Build dashboards and support our scientists and engineers in implementing automated run summaries and performance metrics.

• Partner with users, set priorities, and drive adoption. Gather requirements directly from scientists and engineers, maintain a prioritized roadmap, and make sound build-versus-buy decisions. Train users, gather feedback, and iterate on tools and workflows.

• Raise our software standards. Establish version control, code review, testing, and documentation practices for the team's scripts and tools, including AI-assisted code, and coach teammates on these practices. Review, integrate, and maintain tools built across the company so they share data and meet common standards.

• Run what you build. Deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, and maintain the applications, databases, and infrastructure supporting these systems.

Qualifications

Required

• Degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related science or engineering field with equivalent professional software experience

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of independently scoping, prioritizing, building, deploying, and supporting production systems

• Strong Python and SQL, including experience building maintainable applications or services and designing relational schemas (PostgreSQL or similar)

• Sound software engineering practices: Git, automated testing, code review, and documentation that enables others to maintain your work

• Hands-on experience analyzing and visualizing data in Python (e.g., pandas, NumPy, plotting and dashboard libraries)

• Strong communication with non-software colleagues: ability to learn a new technical domain, turn loosely defined needs into working tools, and help users adopt them

• Strong experience using AI-assisted development tools, with accountability for the correctness, security, testing, and maintainability of the resulting code

Strongly preferred

• Experience with time-series or sensor data from physical systems (test and telemetry, process data, or lab instruments)

• Experience in hardware, manufacturing, or lab and scientific R&D settings (e.g., traceability, QC, LIMS, or MES)

• Docker, Linux administration, basic networking

• Startup or small-team experience owning infrastructure end to end

Nice to have

• Data-acquisition or industrial systems (DAQFactory, Ignition, LabVIEW, LabJack; Modbus, OPC UA)

• Statistical analysis of experimental data (regression, design of experiments, statistical process control)

• Experience with Nominal, the Notion API, or JMP

• Background in chemistry, chemical, materials, or mechanical engineering, or physics

• Desire to establish software engineering culture and mentor future team members as the company scales

Company Culture and Benefits

• Challenging, collaborative, and meaningful work and an important voice in company development

• Competitive salary commensurate with experience

• Meaningful equity compensation

• Generous PTO allowing employees to take time off to rest, recharge, and enjoy life outside work

• Excellent insurance with 100% of healthcare, vision, and dental premiums covered for the employee, and 80% coverage for dependents

• 401(k) with company match