About the role
Podium Automation is an early-stage startup reimagining industrial control panel manufacturing through software-enabled design and automated fabrication. We’re building technology to create a new industrial supply chain and reduce lead times for critical electrical equipment from months to days. We are growing rapidly in NYC and are backed by a16z’s American Dynamism fund, SV Angel, and Banter Capital. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer who is excited to invent new technology in the built world. You will own and lead our component intelligence platform — the backbone of data that makes instant, accurate panel design possible. The Problem You'll Solve Industrial control panels are built from hundreds of components: contactors, terminal blocks, PLCs, switches, and more. Each component has rich, structured data — terminal semantics, electrical ratings, spatial information, certifications — that our design software depends on to generate accurate, manufacturable panels. Very little of this data is accessible in machine-readable form. It is buried in complex, inconsistent sources like PDFs, user manuals, datasheets, STEP files, and diagrams. Structuring this data manually does not scale. Your job is to solve this problem at the root. You will design and build systems that extract, validate, and serve trustworthy information from these challenging data sources.
What You'll Do Platform Ownership: Own the technical roadmap and expansion of our proprietary data model for industrial devices. Extraction Pipeline Design: Architect and build extraction pipelines that pull structured data from PDFs, datasheets, user manuals, STEP files, images, and manufacturer APIs. The right solution might involve purpose-built parsers and validators, off-the-shelf tools like OCR libraries, ML-based approaches, or some combination — you'll determine the best fit. Continuous Improvement: Extraction is not the end of the story. We iterate on and refine component data, gaining trust in it over time. You will add confidence scoring, human-in-the-loop review, and rollout strategies. You’ll expose device data as a landscape with varying degrees of accuracy, completeness, and effectiveness. Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborate closely with electrical and process engineers to identify data needs and translate them into software solutions. Serve as the technical leader for this domain and a mentor for other engineers. Strategic Growth: Proactively identify and pursue new opportunities to improve the business through the application of technology. We are a software-enabled hardware company, and when an unexpected opportunity presents itself we take it. Our Stack We use Deno, Postgres, SQL Server, HTMX, Docker, Terraform, and AWS. As the owner of this domain, you have the latitude to adopt whatever tools, frameworks, models, or services best fit the problem.
