Senior Manager, DevOps Engineering

SPACE SYSTEMS

At Rocket Lab, we’re not just launching rockets — we're building the future of space. Our Space Systems team builds everything from complete spacecraft, precision payloads to the components and subsystems that allow them to thrive in space, like solar panels, flight software, star trackers, optical systems, separation systems, radios, and more.

Our Space Systems team has enabled more than 1,700 missions, ranging from interplanetary exploration, in‑space manufacturing to national security and defense initiatives. The team has built spacecraft, payloads, and components for missions to the Moon and Mars, working with partners including NASA, the Space Development Agency, and the U.S. Space Force. Whether it’s a single high‑performance spacecraft, constellation, or the vertically integrated components that help them get to space — our world class Space Systems team is empowering some of the boldest and most ambitious space missions.

Rocket Lab’s Optical Systems division solves mission‑critical space domain and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) challenges for Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC) customers. Our vision is to revolutionize the space‑based payload market with innovative and novel designs for space, terrestrial, and airborne environments. Building on more than 20 years of electro‑optical and infrared systems innovation from Geost, Optical Systems delivers solutions to the warfighter for responsive, scalable sensing solutions across all orbital domains.

As a Senior Manager, Dev Ops Engineering based at our Optical Systems site in Chantilly, VA, you will have the privilege of supporting Tranche 3 of the U.S. Space Development Agency’s (SDA) Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) by managing a team of software development operations engineers that deploy applications for advanced space payloads.

• Lead a team of engineers across business level functions – enterprise tools, finance tools, engineering development process, software development integration and deployment.
• Drive best practices for AWS Cloud based architecture and development and production environments.
• Collaborate with project leaders and team members to meet mission objectives.
• Work directly with Security and IT for policy assurance.
• Develop and support pipelines that include automation and configurations for containers, data management, and release/deployment solutions for programs.
• Automate software deployments into varied and complex environments using virtual machines, container technologies, Kubernetes, Cloud environments, and bare metal servers.
• Support engagements related to assessing, refactoring and identifying opportunities for existing applications to leverage modern application architectures (e.g. containers).
• Lead Agile sprints and associated activities.
• Support onsite work, as well as travel or off‑site work, as needed.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or an equivalent technical discipline.
• 1‑3 years of software engineering or devops management experience.
• Active TS/SCI security clearance and Counterintelligence Polygraph.
• 10+ years of experience in architecting AWS cloud solutions with EC2, ELB, RDS, Route
  53, Cloud Watch, or S3.
• Experience with Dev Ops tools and pipelines such as Bitbucket, Jenkins, Sonar Qube, or Artifactory.
• Ability to design, enable, deliver scalable and automated IaC tools such as Ansible and Terraform.
• Experience working with containerization technologies Kubernetes or Docker.
• Experience with cloud network resources such as VPC, URL, DNS, ACLs, security, and routing tables.
• Background in scripting or coding with Java, Python, Terraform, or Bash.
• Experience with cross‑compilation for embedded systems.
• Proficiency in Linux system administration.
• CompTIA Security+ certification (or in pursuit of).
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate.

• Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, or an equivalent discipline.
• Experience with on‑premises to cloud migrations or…