Launch Operations Engineer Jobs in Texas (NOW HIRING)

ABOUT FIREFLY AEROSPACE

Firefly Aerospace is a space and defense technology company that enables our world to launch, land, and operate in space anywhere, anytime. As the partner of choice for critical space missions, Firefly is the only commercial company to launch a satellite to orbit with 24-hour notice and the only company to achieve a successful Moon landing. Our launch vehicles, lunar landers, and orbital vehicles provide government and commercial customers with full mission services from low Earth orbit to the Moon and beyond. Headquartered in north Austin, Texas, Firefly is looking for passionate, hardworking innovators to join our team and help fuel our successful trajectory into space.

SUMMARY

As a DevOps Engineer III at Firefly Aerospace, you will design, deploy, and operate the cloud and on-premises infrastructure that powers mission-critical spacecraft ground systems. This role is responsible for enabling reliable, scalable, secure, and highly available software platforms that support spacecraft operations, mission planning, telemetry processing, command execution, and enterprise ground segment services.

You will work closely with software engineers, mission operators, cybersecurity, IT, and systems engineering teams to deploy and maintain complex distributed systems spanning Kubernetes clusters, cloud infrastructure, streaming data platforms, databases, and CI/CD pipelines. As Firefly evolves toward enterprise, multi-tenant ground systems supporting multiple missions and customers, you will play a key role in designing infrastructure architectures that provide scalability, resiliency, observability, security, and operational excellence.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design, deploy, and maintain cloud and on-premises infrastructure supporting spacecraft and launch vehicle ground software systems.

• Deploy and operate containerized applications using Kubernetes, Docker, and related orchestration technologies.

• Design and manage scalable environments for distributed microservice architectures supporting mission operations.

• Develop and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solutions for provisioning and configuration management.

• Build, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, Argo CD, GitOps methodologies, and related DevOps tooling.

• Deploy and scale enterprise data platforms including message brokers, stream processing frameworks, databases, and observability systems.

• Design highly available and fault-tolerant architectures supporting mission-critical operations.

• Assist software development teams with application deployment, performance optimization, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

• Design and implement cloud architectures within AWS utilizing services such as EKS, EC2, IAM, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and related technologies.

• Develop infrastructure solutions supporting multi-mission and multi-tenant ground system deployments.

• Collaborate with cybersecurity and IT teams to implement secure authentication, authorization, auditing, and compliance controls.

• Support capacity planning, infrastructure sizing, performance analysis, and system scalability assessments.

• Implement and maintain observability solutions including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and operational dashboards.

• Support software deployments across development, integration, test, staging, and production environments.

• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and operational readiness activities.

• Contribute to architecture reviews and technology evaluations to improve reliability, scalability, and maintainability of Firefly ground systems.

QUALIFICATIONS

Required:

• BS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related technical field.

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform Engineering, or related infrastructure roles.

• Experience deploying and operating containerized applications using Kubernetes or Docker Swarm in production environments.

• Experience designing and supporting distributed microservice architectures.

• Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, Argo CD, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or similar tools.

• Experience managing cloud infrastructure within AWS.

• Strong understanding of Infrastructure-as-Code concepts and tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar platforms.

• Experience administering Linux-based systems in production environments.

• Knowledge of networking fundamentals including load balancing, TLS, DNS, VPNs, routing, and firewall concepts.

• Experience implementing authentication and authorization solutions using IAM, SSO, LDAP, Active Directory, OAuth2, OIDC, or similar technologies.

• Experience with monitoring, logging, observability, and operational support practices.

• Strong troubleshooting and performance analysis skills across infrastructure, applications, and networking layers.

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

Desired:

• MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.

• Experience supporting spacecraft, aerospace, defense, satellite, or other mission-critical operational systems.

• Experience operating large-scale Kubernetes platforms supporting multiple applications and tenants.

• Experience deploying and scaling data streaming and event-driven platforms such as Apache Pulsar, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or similar technologies.

• Experience with time-series databases and telemetry-focused data architectures.

• Experience deploying and managing observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, or similar tools.

• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud and regulated cloud environments.

• Experience implementing high-availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity architectures.

• Familiarity with cybersecurity frameworks including NIST 800-171, RMF, CMMC, or related compliance standards.

• Active security clearance.

Firefly offers outstanding benefits for our employees, including generous health, dental and vision plans with low plan deductibles, parental leave, educational reimbursement, short term disability, and flexible PTO options.

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Firefly Aerospace, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Firefly is governed based on merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status