Staff Software Engineer

About this 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 c...