Senior Infrastructure Engineer

About the role

The BlackSky Platform team is building the premier global intelligence platform to deliver timely, relevant, and actionable information to customers. As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer, you will design, build and operate platforms that run our customer workloads across public cloud, private data centers, and air-gapped/disconnected environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate AWS infrastructure (VPC, subnets, NLB/ALB, IAM, EKS, EC2, S3, Route 53) and the hybrid connectivity that ties cloud to on-premises and private/air-gapped networks.
• Stand up and run production-grade Kubernetes clusters on EKS, Rancher (RKE2) and/or Red Hat OpenShift 4, including upgrades, capacity planning, networking, storage, and day-2 operations.
• Implement and own GitOps workflows with Argo CD — declarative cluster and application state, app-of-apps patterns, sync policies, drift detection, and progressive rollout strategies.
• Author, version, and maintain Helm charts for internal and third-party workloads, including values management, chart dependencies, and templating standards across environments.
• Build repeatable delivery into disconnected environments using Zarf (and equivalent packaging/mirroring tooling) — bundling images, charts, and manifests for air-gapped installs and reproducible deployments.
• Codify infrastructure and platform configuration as code (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize) with a clear build-once / promote-per-environment strategy.
• Build and harden CI/CD pipelines that move artifacts safely from dev through to restricted production and BCP targets.
• Integrate platform services — certificate management (cert-manager), secrets management, container registries, storage, and observability — as shared, reusable building blocks.
• Establish operational standards: monitoring, alerting, logging, runbooks, incident response, and capacity/cost management.

Required Qualifications

• At least five years years in infrastructure, platform, DevOps, or SRE engineering, with at least 3 years running Kubernetes in production.
• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field of study or equivalent experience (four years).
• Strong hands-on AWS experience across networking, compute, storage, and IAM, including hybrid/on-prem connectivity patterns.
• Production experience operating Kubernetes in one or more enterprise distributions — Amazon EKS, Rancher/RKE2, or OpenShift 4.
• Demonstrated GitOps experience with Argo CD (or Flux) as the primary deployment mechanism.
• Proficiency authoring and maintaining Helm charts, and a solid grasp of Kubernetes primitives (workloads, networking, RBAC, storage, CRDs/operators).
• Experience with the Kubernetes Operator deployment model — deploying and managing workloads via operators and CRDs (OLM/OperatorHub).
• Strong infrastructure-as-code skills, ideally with Terraform.
• Comfort with Linux systems administration and scripting (Bash, plus Python or Go).
• Experience building on hardened, non-CVE / zero-known-vulnerability base images (e.g., Chainguard, Iron Bank, or distroless/minimal baselines) and supply-chain security practices.
• Production monitoring and observability with Prometheus and Grafana (exporters, PromQL, alerting, dashboards).
• Clear written and verbal communication, and the ability to work independently across the full lifecycle of a platform component.

Preferred Qualifications

• Breadth across all three of EKS, Rancher/RKE2, and OpenShift 4, with the ability to move fluidly between them.
• Experience running Kubernetes in edge / resource-constrained environments (e.g., k3s), including the operational tradeoffs of lightweight and disconnected deployments.
• Direct experience packaging and deploying into air-gapped / disconnected environments using Zarf, image mirroring, and private registries.
• Container and image scanning experience (Trivy, Grype, Clair, or equivalents) integrated into CI/CD and registry workflows.
• Familiarity with secrets management (Vault, External Secrets Operator) and PKI/certificate automation.
• Experience with persistent storage at scale (Ceph, EBS/EFS-backed storage classes).
• Hands-on OpenTelemetry (OTEL) experience — instrumenting services, running the OTEL Collector, and standardizing traces, metrics, and logs across the platform.
• Centralized log aggregation and analysis with Elasticsearch / OpenSearch (and shippers such as Fluent Bit, Fluentd, or Logstash).
• Background supporting regulated, government, or other compliance-driven programs.
• Service mesh experience with Istio (traffic management, mTLS, ingress/egress gateways, and observability integration).