Lead DevOps Engineer

Behind every mission is a ground segment and behind the ground segment is this team.

We are building a DevSecOps team that acts as the organization's technical special force: an autonomous, cross-functional group of specialists working at the intersection of DevSecOps, security, AI, and mission-critical space systems. We accelerate delivery, reduce technical debt, and build the shared technical platform the entire organization runs on. We step in where bottlenecks, risks, or acceleration needs exist: deliver, stabilize, and hand off. No ticket hoarding, no empire building.

This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role for engineers who move fast, take ownership, and thrive where the problems are real and the solutions ship end-to-end.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own and operate the CI/CD platform and its build fleet: capacity, reliability, autoscaling, upgrade cycles.

• Run the observability platform end to end: metrics, logs, traces, alert routing and escalation for internal services.

• Automate provisioning and host configuration, with infrastructure managed as code by default.

• Maintain the artifact and registry layer, including caching, retention and distribution policy.

• Own backup, restore and disaster recovery for platform services, and prove they work.

• Operate production Kubernetes clusters on premises.

• Improve the platform, not just keep it alive: reduce toil, shorten feedback loops, make the paved road the easiest path.

Requirements:

• At least 5 years of professional experience running production infrastructure, with a background in both software engineering and operations.

• You have built platform capability from scratch or close to it, and kept it running once real users and real load showed up. You think in terms of what breaks when load doubles, and you have seen at least one system through that transition.

• Hands-on ownership of a self-hosted CI/CD platform, including version upgrades, runner or agent fleet operations and troubleshooting under load.

• Hands-on experience running a self-hosted observability stack, plus a real alerting practice: instrumentation, metric and log design, alerts people actually trust.

• Infrastructure as code mindset backed by production experience with declarative provisioning and configuration management.

• Confident Linux systems engineering: networking, storage, systemd, TLS and PKI, performance and failure diagnosis.

• Kubernetes in production, ideally on bare metal or on-prem clusters rather than managed cloud only.

• Solid programming skills in at least one language such as Python, Go, Java, C# or C++. 

Nice to have:

• Hypervisor or virtualization platform driven through code.

• Secrets management and PKI at scale.

• Identity and access management systems.

• Experience in regulated, air-gapped or otherwise high-assurance environments.