Senior Cloud Systems Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Are you passionate about shaping the future of humanity's presence in space? Lunar Outpost, an industry leader in space robotics and planetary vehicles, invites you to join our team! Lunar Outpost is dedicated to creating a permanent presence in space, while also driving positive impacts here on Earth. Currently, we are seeking a Senior Cloud Systems Engineer to contribute to our mission in a dynamic startup environment. The main responsibilities of this role include managing Stargate deployments in production, ensuring high availability and uptime, executing reliable releases, and driving operational excellence through comprehensive monitoring, metrics, and infrastructure management. Stargate is a next-generation Command and Control (C2) platform—the ground software that enables and empowers all Lunar Outpost missions, including the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program. As mission-agnostic software used by all operators in mission control, Stargate's reliability and uptime are critical to mission success.

Take the #NextLeap with Lunar Outpost and work on the Pegasus LTV, which will carry NASA astronauts farther than they've ever been before on the lunar surface! 

Working Conditions / Schedule: This position is required to be onsite Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Where applicable, employees may work remotely on Wednesdays from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Additional hours may be required based on business needs.

Key Responsibilities:  

• Own and manage Stargate production releases and deployment pipelines using GitOps practices 

• Drive operational excellence initiatives including metrics collection, log aggregation, uptime monitoring, KPI tracking, and SIM Integration 

• Maintain and achieve 99.99% (four nines) to 99.999% (five nines) uptime SLAs 

• Design, develop, and maintain Helm charts for Stargate and related infrastructure components 

• Implement and manage progressive deployment strategies including canary deployments and blue-green deployments 

• Oversee critical Kubernetes infrastructure including volume management, DNS configuration, load balancer provisioning, and secret monitoring/management

• Manage and optimize Kubernetes deployments and related AWS services 

• Implement and maintain observability stack using OpenTelemetry for comprehensive monitoring and alerting 

• Collaborate with engineering teams to establish and enforce operational best practices and reliability standards 

Required Qualifications:  

• 5+ years of production DevOps/SRE experience with demonstrable track record of maintaining high-availability systems 

• Kubernetes administration experience with elevated cluster access in production environments 

• Strong proficiency writing and maintaining Helm charts for complex, multi-component applications 

• Hands-on experience implementing canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and other progressive delivery patterns 

• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes infrastructure management: persistent volumes, DNS/networking, load balancers, and secrets management 

• Production experience with GitOps workflows and Flux CD 

• Proven track record maintaining 99.99%+ uptime in production environments 

• Excellent judgment and decision-making skills when working with production systems 
• Familiarity with Aetherflux for declarative canary orchestration and progressive rollout gating

Preferred Qualifications:  

• Experience with AWS cloud services, particularly EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), Secrets Manager, VPC networking, IAM, and AWS Load Balancers 

• Experience with Karpenter for Kubernetes node autoscaling and cluster optimization 

• Experience with OpenTelemetry instrumentation and observability platforms 

• Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, or CKS) 

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.) 

• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CDK) 

• Experience implementing SRE practices including SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets 

Compensation & Benefits: Compensation level and base salary are competitively structured and thoughtfully determined based on factors such as relevant skills, experience, education, and the scope of the role.

• Comprehensive health coverage: Medical, dental, and vision benefits, with 70% of premiums covered by the employer
• Paid time off: Three (3) weeks per year of vacation
• Retirement plan: Up to 4% employer match on 401(k) contributions
• Paid holidays: 11 company-recognized holidays
• Parental leave
• Educational reimbursement opportunities to support company objectives, continued learning, and career development

Lunar Outpost Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. Lunar Outpost Inc. does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), national origin, ethnicity, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. All employees, including executives and human resources personnel, are expected to conduct themselves with professionalism and treat others with dignity and respect in accordance with this policy.