Job Summary:
Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company focused on connecting space and Earth. The Infrastructure Engineer will own and operate components of the Northwood infrastructure stack, build and maintain infrastructure as code, and collaborate across teams to ensure operational excellence.
Responsibilities:
• Own and operate one or more components of the Northwood infrastructure stack (CI/CD, app platform, cloud/IaC, networking, observability, security tooling). Take a defined scope and execute without ongoing oversight.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code. Default to Terraform, Helm, and GitOps.
• Carry on-call for the infra stack. Handle the majority of incidents to resolution independently.
• Run post-incident reviews for incidents you owned.
• Partner with security engineering and compliance on controls implementation in your areas - Vault policies, IAM boundaries, SIEM coverage, evidence collection.
• Treat toil as a design signal. When manual work repeats, automate it or fix the underlying system.
• Write and maintain runbooks, design docs, and component documentation. Keep them current with the system.
• Collaborate across infra, product engineering, and ground station operations on cross-cutting work.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 3-5 years of production infrastructure experience (SRE, DevOps, platform, network, or systems engineering).
• Working competence across: Linux, networking fundamentals, AWS or equivalent cloud, infrastructure as code (Terraform), containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling. Not expert in all — competent enough to operate and contribute.
• Demonstrated ownership of a production system end-to-end: design, implementation, operation.
• On-call experience in a production environment with measurable reliability outcomes.
• Comfortable in code (Python, Go, or similar) for automation, tooling, and integration work.
• Strong technical writing — design docs, runbooks, post-mortems.
• 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.
Preferred:
• Strong background in one or more of the following. We're hiring generalists with a spike, not specialists — depth in one area weighs heavily, but not at the cost of breadth across the basics.
• Networking — enterprise (FortiGate, switching), site/ground station, or core (TGW, WireGuard, BGP, IPsec)
• Security engineering — Vault, identity (Okta, IAM), SIEM operations, hardening
• Compliance partnership — implementing technical controls for CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST 800-171, ITAR
• Observability at scale — VictoriaMetrics or Prometheus, Grafana, alerting design, log pipelines (Vector, Loki)
• App platform — EKS at scale, on-prem k3s, ArgoCD and GitOps patterns
• CI/CD and developer experience — pipeline design, scanning and linting, release engineering
• Cloud architecture — multi-account AWS, GovCloud, Cloudflare
• On-prem and hardware-adjacent ops — bringing up systems in remote or austere environments, ground stations, edge sites
Company:
Taking space missions further faster. Check out our open roles: https://www.northwoodspace.io/careers Founded in 2023, the company is headquartered in Torrance, USA, with a team of 51-200 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.