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.