Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Low Earth orbit is open for business. Varda is accelerating the development of commercial space infrastructure, from in-orbit pharmaceutical processing to reliable and economical reentry capsules.

From life-saving pharmaceuticals to more powerful fiber optics, there is a world of products used on Earth today that can only be manufactured in space. Varda is accelerating innovation in the orbital economy by creating both the products and infrastructure needed so space can directly benefit life on Earth. Our mission is to expand the economic bounds of humankind.

Our team is uniquely suited to accomplishing this goal, with leadership and staff comprised of veterans from Space

X, Blue Origin, major pharmaceutical companies and Silicon Valley. Varda was founded in January 2021 by Will Bruey and Delian Asparouhov with significant backing from world class investors including Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, Caffeinated Capital, General Catalyst, and Also Capital.

Varda is headquartered in El Segundo, California, where we have offices and a production facility where our vehicles, equipment, and materials are built, integrated, and tested. Varda also has offices in Washington, DC and Huntsville, AL (coming soon).

Join Varda, and work to create a bustling in-space ecosystem.

About This Role

As a Principal Site Reliability Engineer, you will help set the technical vision and strategy for reliability across spacecraft, ground systems, and enterprise platforms. You’ll define standards, mentor senior engineers, and drive cross-organizational initiatives to ensure systems are highly operable, secure, and mission-ready. This role combines deep technical expertise with the ability to influence architectural direction at the company level.

Responsibilities

• Lead and contribute hands-on to the deployment, maintenance, and operations of mission-critical applications and infrastructure supporting spacecraft, ground systems, and company-wide platforms.
• Design, execute, and manage highly scalable, reliable, and operable software and infrastructure platforms, applying Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles to drive automation, consistency, and repeatability across Kubernetes environments.
• Collaborate closely with software and hardware teams to align reliability best practices, CI/CD pipelines, and compliance with their workflows, enabling faster, more secure deployments for mission-critical systems.
• Anticipate and address reliability risks, capacity challenges, and performance bottlenecks; develop long-term strategies in partnership with leadership.
• Rotate through the team’s on-call schedule to keep critical systems healthy and responsive.
• Occasionally travel to customer sites and other Varda locations to troubleshoot, deploy, or test critical infrastructure.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, Dev Ops, or systems engineering, including leadership of large-scale, mission-critical systems.
• Experience leading technical direction and architecture for large-scale systems
• Hands-on experience with observability stacks and telemetry pipelines—including metrics collection, alerting, and dashboards—for Linux systems and Kubernetes workloads (e.g., Prometheus and Grafana).
• Strong background in systems architecture and software-defined networking (VPC, subnets, firewalls, VPNs, etc.).
• Proficiency in automation and scripting with Python, Bash, or similar languages
• Positive and strong communication skills, both written and oral

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Expertise in time-series databases (e.g., Influx
  
  DB) for large-scale telemetry pipeline.
• Expertise in provisioning and managing scalable Azure cloud infrastructure using native tools and best practices (Azure GCC High preferred).
• Experience with IaC tools like Terraform, and Ansible and CI/CD systems like Git and ArgoCD
• Experience building and maintaining dynamic system configurations with templating frameworks such as YAML, and Helm.
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, containerization technologies, and Kubernetes internals

• Senior Site Reliability Engineer:  - $ per year
• Leveling and base salary is determined by job-related skills, education level, experience…