Production Engineer, Site Reliability (Application Software)

About the role

SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to enable human life on Mars. The application software team is the central nervous system of SpaceX, building mission-critical platforms that accelerate vehicle software delivery, testing, and operations for every Falcon 9, Starship, and Dragon mission, while also powering Starlink’s global growth. This position will significantly reduce safety-critical build and test times for vehicle software, directly impacting Starship.

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer who brings a strong SRE mindset, cares deeply about safety, quality, and attention to detail, and possesses the ability to understand the big picture before writing code. The ideal candidate fully understands what they are building, enjoys hard problem solving, thinks strategically, and is decisive, organized, and self-critical. Aerospace experience is not required.

Responsibilities

• Deploy, upgrade, operate, maintain, and scale our suite of mission-critical products and services
• Manage our underlying infrastructure as code and use modern observability tools to provide a complete picture of application health
• Closely collaborate with software engineers to design and build highly operable, maintainable, and testable systems
• Engage in and improve the entire software development lifecycle — from inception and design through deployment, operation, and continuous refinement
• Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems
• Provide high-quality end-user support to vehicle software engineers
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation
• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks using measurement and creative engineering

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, or an engineering discipline; OR 3+ years of professional experience in SRE or DevOps in lieu of a degree
• 1+ years of experience with Python and Python-based development frameworks
• Experience with Linux operating systems
• Must be able to work extended hours and weekends as needed
• To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C.1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C.1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience with build systems (Bazel, Buck, Make, etc.)
• Experience with both container and virtualization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, vSphere, QEMU, KVM, etc.)
• Experience with databases and data modeling (Postgres, MySQL, ClickHouse, etc.)
• Experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools for managing fleets of servers
• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, or similar automation frameworks
• Knowledge of the technologies that predate and underpin modern cloud infrastructure, with the ability to translate high-level developer experiences into specific implementations from first principles
• Ability to work with mission-critical and sensitive systems with appropriate urgency and care
• Ability to communicate effectively with customers, peers, and management in both formal and informal settings
• Experience with full-stack development (the team primarily uses Python, JavaScript, and C#; end users primarily use C++)

Pay

Pay Range:

• Level I: $125,000.00 - $160,000.00 per year
• Level II: $145,000.00 - $195,000.00 per year

Your actual level and base salary will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on job-related knowledge, skills, education, and experience. Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package at SpaceX.

Benefits

• Eligibility for long-term incentives in the form of company stock, stock options, or long-term cash awards
• Potential discretionary bonuses and the ability to purchase additional stock at a discount through an Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage
• Access to a 401(k) retirement plan
• Short & long-term disability insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid parental leave
• Various discounts and perks
• 3 weeks of paid vacation & eligibility for 10 or more paid holidays per year
• Paid sick leave pursuant to Company policy, satisfying or exceeding legal requirements