Location: Spirit Lake, ID (onsite, hybrid negotiable) | Type: Full-time | Base Pay: $120,000 – $180,000 / year | Category: Information Technology
About Star-Batt
Star-Batt is building more than ruggedized power systems. We are building a brand around resilience, self-reliance, and equipment that works where there is no infrastructure and no second chance. Our systems keep Starlink Mini running off-grid for over 24 hours, and our customers are overlanders in the backcountry, wildfire and utility crews, and military and federal teams. We sell direct-to-consumer, through dealers, to the government, and to the military, all at once.
We also run the company on software we wrote ourselves. Our ERP is a custom platform with an AI layer our staff work with every day and a fleet of coding agents that write most of the code, open their own pull requests, and ship through automated gates. We are hiring the person who will run it and keep building it as our operations grow.
The Role
We are looking for a mad scientist who can build with AI, understands what he or she is building, and makes sure it is secure.
That is the whole job in one sentence, and each part of it matters. Plenty of people can prompt their way to working code. Fewer can explain what that code actually does, where it will break, and what it exposes. Almost nobody is doing all three at production scale inside a company that runs on the result. We are, and we want the person who is excited by that rather than nervous about it.
The Principal Systems Engineer is Star-Batt’s first dedicated software engineer hire, reporting to our Co-Founder and Chief Engineering Officer. You will take over day-to-day ownership of the ERP and its agent pipeline, serve as administrator for our software stack, own the network and the servers, and own security.
Most of our ERP code is written by agents, not by hand. They triage incoming issues, write the fix, open the pull request, and pass it through automated review and testing gates before anything reaches production. The overwhelming majority of our issues route through that pipeline. So this is not a job where you type the daily fixes. It is a job where you run the system that does, steer it when it drifts, catch what it gets wrong, and personally solve the hard problems it cannot close. That is a harder job than writing the code yourself, and very few people have done it.
This is a lean operation by design. We do not add headcount to solve problems we can engineer our way out of, and we give the people we do hire an unusual amount of leverage. This is an individual contributor role, and it is meant to stay that way: your leverage comes from the systems you build, not from the number of people reporting to you. If the idea of doing more with less energizes you, you will like it here.
We also expect you to stay on the absolute cutting edge of AI development. Not as a hobby, as part of the job. The tooling in this space changes month to month, and the company that adopts a capability six months before its competitors compounds that advantage. We want the person who is already reading the release notes, already testing what shipped last week, and already telling us what we should be doing differently.
Our technical function is new. Much of the infrastructure is still being built. You will help build it, then run it.
The role is onsite in Spirit Lake, Idaho, with hybrid negotiable for the right person. This work depends on being able to walk into the building and sit with the people whose systems you own.
What You’ll Do
ERP Development and the Agent Pipeline
- Keep the agent fleet triaging issues, writing fixes, and opening pull requests; review what it produces and handle what it escalates
- Keep the automated gates green and own the release process into production
- Maintain the agents’ instructions, permissions, and guardrails, and the accounts they run on
- Own the database schema and its migrations, and the documentation that keeps the AI layer accurate
- Turn business requests from all departments into shipped features, usually within a day
- Personally solve the hard problems the agents cannot close on their own
Systems Administration
- Serve as administrator of record for the entire stack
- Own accounts, licensing, permissions, integrations, vendor relationships, and renewal decisions
Website
- Take ownership of star-batt.com, front end and back end, once the current rebuild launches
- Own performance, uptime, deployment, and the commerce path
- Plan site and platform changes together, since the ERP depends on how the site behaves
Cybersecurity
- Own our security posture end to end, across the platform, the network, endpoints, and the AI layer
- Maintain a security roadmap that includes proactive gap assessments and prioritized remediation
- Determine which compliance frameworks apply to our federal and military business, and deliver a prioritized plan with cost and effort attached
- Own AI-agent security. Define and enforce what production agents are allowed to do as this emerging threat surface evolves
Infrastructure and Endpoints
- Own employee devices and accounts, onboarding and offboarding
- Own the private network every person and server sits on, and the office network at Spirit Lake
- Administer the Linux infrastructure running the platform
Automation
- Treat manual processes anywhere in the company as defects, and remove them without being asked
- Direct outside contractors and the agent fleet, and own that budget
- Define the tooling, standards, and roadmap this function runs on
What We’re Looking For
Required
- 5+ years in software engineering, systems administration, or a blend of the two, with clear growth in scope and ownership
- Full-stack TypeScript. Our platform is React and Node, and our CI blocks type errors
- Real relational database and schema design experience, at a scale where migrations have consequences
- REST API integration across a large third-party surface, with the ability to debug at the API level
- Git and pull-request workflow, including automated gates and a controlled path to production
- Hands-on experience running coding agents unattended. Not negotiable. You must be able to run and supervise agents working without you at the keyboard, which means writing their instructions, setting their permissions, and building their guardrails, not just prompting interactively
- Production Linux server administration
- Network fundamentals, including private and zero-trust networking
- Security fundamentals, and the judgment to tell a lean company what it actually needs rather than what a checklist says
- Self-directed. You can take an ambiguous problem and come back with a structured answer, and you can diagnose a failure without being briefed on it
- A genuine understanding of what you build. We are not looking for someone who ships code they cannot explain
Preferred
- Manufacturing or hardware-company experience: BOMs, inventory, shop floor, physical fulfillment
- Exposure to a compliance framework such as NIST 800-171, CMMC, or SOC 2
- Experience being the first technical hire somewhere, or building a system from nothing
- A track record of adopting new tooling early and being right about it
- Genuine interest in what we make. Hunters, overlanders, boaters, and backcountry people tend to do well here
Why This Role
- Complete ownership of the ERP, the agent pipeline, the stack, and the security posture, with no layers between you and the decision
- A chance to build something from nothing at a company growing fast, and to keep building it
- One of the most modern engineering environments you will find anywhere, at any size. Most companies are still talking about running AI agents in production. We already do, and we intend to stay ahead
- Maximum leverage. A lean company means your work is never diluted, never re-litigated by committee, and never sits in a queue
- Work you can see. The system you keep running is what gets a battery onto a truck and out to someone who needs it
- A forty-hour week in North Idaho, where you can be on the lake or in the backcountry twenty minutes after you close your laptop
Benefits
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Generous paid time off and holiday schedule
- Employer retirement plan
- Employee discounts on Star-Batt products
- 40 hours per week with no standing on-call rotation. A written severity ladder covers the rare outage that justifies an after-hours call, with comp time when it happens
- A high-impact, entrepreneurial environment where your work directly shapes how the company runs
How to Apply
Email careers@star-batt.com with:
- Your resume
- A link to something you built. GitHub, a live system, a project write-up. We care more about this than the resume
- A few sentences on the most complicated thing you have taught yourself in the last two years, and how you went about it
If we see a fit, the next step is a technical conversation with our Chief Engineering Officer, who built the system you would be taking over.
Star-Batt LLC is an equal opportunity employer. Veterans are encouraged to apply.