Infrastructure Engineer

About the role

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

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• This position requires successfully obtaining and maintaining a Top Secret Security Clearance as a condition of employment.
• 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 Qualifications

• 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