like so even if I kill the job, it can pick up where it left off?

As long as you provide a

--job-id

, Meltano saves intermediate state in

.meltano/meltano.db

. The

state.json

files are only written out when a job ends. But, when you reuse the same

--job-id

, meltano will resume using the state it has saved in the db.