Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company bringing the benefits of space to the masses through advanced communications technology. We are building a global network of phased array ground stations that enable real-time, reliable communication for satellite missions such as national security, global connectivity, and disaster response. With a vertically integrated approach, Northwood designs, builds, and rapidly deploys scalable systems that power the next generation of space missions. If you like solving complex challenges and seeing your work deployed around the world with real impact, Northwood is the place to do it.

Role

Senior individual contributor role on the Northwood Infrastructure team. Works from ambiguity, develops scope, and serves as the final escalation point for on-call.

Responsibilities

• Develop and drive scope in one or more areas of the infrastructure stack. Take ambiguous problems from framing through design, implementation, and operation.
• Set the technical direction for your areas — write RFCs, evaluate tradeoffs, and make decisions that affect how the team operates for years.
• Act as the final escalation point on-call. Drive resolution of the hardest incidents and lead post‑incident reviews that produce durable fixes.
• Raise the bar through design review, code review, and mentorship. Develop other engineers by working alongside them, not just reviewing their output.
• Partner with security, compliance, product engineering, and ground station ops as a peer technical leader. Translate between infrastructure constraints and the needs of other teams.
• Identify systemic toil and underinvestment. Propose and execute the work that eliminates it, including work that spans other engineers' domains.
• Represent the infrastructure team in technical decisions across the organization. Write the documents others reference.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of production infrastructure experience (SRE, DevOps, platform, network, or systems engineering), with demonstrated ownership of systems that were still operating well years after they were built.
• Working competence across: Linux, networking, AWS or equivalent cloud, infrastructure as code (Terraform), containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability, secrets management. Expert‑level depth in at least one of these.
• Track record of taking ambiguous problems and producing designs and implementation that others can operate. Not just executing well‑scoped work.
• Senior on‑call experience — has been the person a team escalates to, not just a rotation participant.
• Strong code and automation skills (Python, Go, or similar). Can build tooling, not just wire together existing tools. Proven technical writing and mentorship. Has grown other engineers and produced documentation that teams continue to use.
• US person status (ITAR requirement).

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep background in one or more of the following. At the senior level, expertise in a domain is expected — the question is which one, not whether.
• Networking — enterprise (FortiGate, switching), site/ground station, or core (TGW, WireGuard, BGP, IPsec), including design across distributed sites
• Security engineering — Vault at scale, identity and IAM architecture, SIEM design and operation, hardening programs
• Compliance partnership — leading technical controls implementation for CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST 800‑171, ITAR, including SSP contribution
• Observability at scale — designing SLO/SLI frameworks, operating VictoriaMetrics or Prometheus, building log pipelines in high‑throughput environments
• App platform — EKS at scale, on‑prem k3s, multi‑cluster ArgoCD and GitOps patterns CI/CD and developer experience — building pipelines and platforms that other engineers depend on daily
• Cloud architecture — multi‑account AWS, GovCloud, Cloudflare, hybrid and air‑gapped deployments
• On‑prem and hardware‑adjacent ops — standing up systems in remote, austere, or regulated environments

Additional Requirements

• This position requires successfully obtaining and maintaining a Top Secret Security Clearance as a condition of employment. While the clearance may not be immediately necessary upon hire, we encourage you to initiate the application process promptly upon accepting this offer. Your ability to secure the necessary clearance is essential for fulfilling key responsibilities of the role. Should you be unable to obtain it, Northwood Space reserves the right to modify or terminate your employment to align with optional needs.

Additional Information

If you need a reasonable accommodation as part of your application for employment or interviews with us, please let us know.

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.

Northwood Space is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Northwood Space is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.