Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Portal Space Systems is on a mission to expand humanity’s freedom of movement in space. We’re building the spacecraft that makes that mission possible. From our Bothell, WA headquarters, we design vehicles with the maneuverability, resilience, and adaptability needed for the next era of orbital operations. Every system we build is in service of a simple idea: space should be more accessible, responsive, and capable.

Joining Portal means stepping into a team that believes in bold engineering, fast iteration, and the power of small groups to change what’s possible. If you want your work to directly shape the future of in-space mobility, join us.

The Senior Infrastructure Engineer owns the architecture and engineering of Portal’s infrastructure, using Azure to its full potential rather than treating the cloud as a place to park virtual machines. The role is responsible for identifying where managed services, automation, and cloud-native patterns can replace manually maintained infrastructure; maintaining a simple, single-site on-premises VMware footprint; engineering backup and disaster recovery; and serving as the technical escalation point and including on-call for critical incidents, for infrastructure issues beyond the scope of the service desk.

This position works closely with the service desk and the engineering teams, and reports directly to the Director of IT, building infrastructure that scales as Portal plans for rapid growth.

• Design cloud-native solutions on Azure: leveraging managed services, PaaS, serverless, and platform-native tooling, rather than defaulting to lift-and-shift VM replication of on-premises patterns
• Continuously evaluate infrastructure for modernization opportunities, replacing manually maintained servers with managed services where they reduce operational burden and improve resilience
• Maintain Portal’s on-premises footprint on a VMware cluster, running basic networking and VMs, keeping it simple and current rather
• Design infrastructure that scales cost-effectively as Portal rapidly grows
• Stay technically ready to extend infrastructure to on-site/edge processing if the business requires it, without prioritizing that buildout today

Network, Identity & M365 Platform Ownership

• Own Portal’s network infrastructure (Fortinet stack) across on-premises and Azure Government
• Serve as the primary in-house owner of Microsoft Entra  the broader Microsoft 365/Azure Government tenant, working alongside M365 and MSP support to demonstrate direct ownership of these systems
• Design and maintain identity, conditional access, and network segmentation in support of least-privilege principles and the compliance framework (CMMC Level 2, DFARS, ITAR)

Backup, Disaster Recovery & Reliability

• Own backup strategy and execution using Veeam across on-premises and cloud workloads
• Engineer and maintain cloud-based disaster recovery for Portal’s on-premises VMware environment, treating DR as a continuously tested capability rather than a one-time project
• Participate in an on-call to respond to critical infrastructure incidents outside business hours
• Treat compute as disposable rather than precious: build with infrastructure as code so environments can be rebuilt on demand instead of hand-nursed back to health

Service Desk Escalation & Internal Customer Experience

• Serve as the escalation point for the MSP-staffed tier-1 service desk on infrastructure issues (servers, network, Entra /M365) beyond their knowledge or authority
• Treat repeat escalations as a design problem: fix the underlying cause so the same issue doesn’t come back, rather than resolving it ticket by ticket
• Deliver responsive, high-quality support to Portal’s engineering organization, balancing the speed engineers expect with the standards infrastructure and security require
• Anticipate infrastructure needs ahead of demand, so engineering teams are rarely blocked waiting on IT

Security, Compliance & GRC Engineering

• Build security and compliance into the design of every solution by default, in support of Portal’s CMMC Level 2, DFARS, and ITAR obligations
• Apply GRC engineering practices: automate compliance evidence collection…