Infrastructure Engineer

Location

Torrance, CA;
Washington D.C.

Full time

Engineering

• $101,200 – $137,920

Compensation at Northwood Space is based on role, level, location, and alignment with market data. Individual base pay is determined on a case‑by‑case basis and may vary depending on job‑related skills, education, experience, and technical expertise. In addition to base salary, Northwood Space offers long‑term incentives such as company stock options and discretionary performance bonuses. Benefits include equity, comprehensive health care, flexible vacation, retirement savings plans, and opportunities for professional development.

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company focused on connecting space and Earth. The world runs on space. Space will run on Northwood. Our global ground network ensures that missions ranging from national security, to global connectivity, to disaster response can unlock their full potential and operate every day without fail.

Core individual contributor role on the Northwood Infrastructure team. Operates defined scope independently with a spike in at least one area of depth.

• 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 Git Ops.
• 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.

• 3–5 years of production infrastructure experience (SRE, Dev Ops, 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.

• 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 (Forti Gate, switching), site/ground station, or core (TGW, Wire Guard, 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 — Victoria Metrics or Prometheus, Grafana, alerting design, log pipelines (Vector, Loki)
• App platform — EKS at scale, on‑prem k3s, ArgoCD and Git Ops patterns
• CI/CD and developer experience — pipeline design, scanning and linting, release engineering
• Cloud architecture — multi‑account AWS, Gov Cloud, Cloudflare
• On‑prem and hardware‑adjacent ops — bringing up systems in remote or austere environments, ground stations, edge sites