Cloud Infrastructure Engineer - Platform Engineering at Xona Space Systems

Job description

Xona is the navigational intelligence company bringing real-time, centimeter-level certainty to any device, anywhere on Earth. With Pulsar – the world’s most advanced PNT satellite infrastructure in Low Earth Orbit – Xona will offer a future-proof, backwards-compatible global positioning system optimized for absolute precision, superior power, and robust protection. Why Xona? You'll get to support a growing satellite constellation as you operate the platform serving our worldwide PNT services on AWS and on-prem, plus our observability backbone built on OpenTelemetry monitoring. We have a great culture of collaboration across engineering, platform, software, and hardware, and incredible teams building the navigation solutions that will define new generations of technology just as GPS did. We care about great developer experience and you'll have support to push for great internal DX while enforcing the platform constraints that meet our strict performance and reliability are central requirements. We're solving hard engineering problems: we want you to work with all of our software teams and understand their unique needs from our platform infrastructure, rather than living in a DevOps silo. Xona is in a period of strong growth: building out support for the satellite constellation and accelerating partnerships with our enterprise PNT users. You're not just maintaining a dusty, legacy stack, but making sure infrastructure stays reliable and can provide the correctness our customers demand while scaling to a global service. Key Responsibilities: - Own cloud operations: You'll run our environments, from alpha to production, on AWS and Kubernetes. Your team helps software engineers scale their services, plan capacity needs, release often, and optimize costs. You empower different software teams by embedding security and infrastructure best practices into their workflows. - Develop best-in-class observability: You'll be on the team that owns our monitoring setup end to end. You implement observability infrastructure to stay ahead of SLOs with dashboards and timely alerts. We favor robust testing and monitoring culture over firefighting in prod; you'll enforce the necessary standards and processes for teams to ship with confidence. - Automate everything: continuous delivery, high availability, hermetic builds, infrastructure-as-code, zero-downtime deployments. You’re comfortable writing quality software in at least one general purpose language. The platform team is always trying to replace manual processes to make things faster and more reproducible. - Design for the future: as Xona's Pulsar constellation goes to 100x, new product directions are a given. You're always thinking about flexibility in our infrastructure and testing/release flows so the foundation lasts. - Be a Kubernetes technical leader: Help establish paved-road patterns for Kubernetes deployment and operations, and become a trusted source of mentorship for teams orchestrating containers across Xona. Qualifications and Requirements: - Strong infrastructure or SRE engineer who gets excited about running systems at scale and making them better every day - Strong Kubernetes experience, including production operations, deployment tooling, networking, IAM, and GitOps patterns on hyperscale vendors; on-premises experience (OpenShift/etc) is also a plus. - Thoughtful about how testing/release workflow design affect system reliability in a microservices architecture - Experienced with container orchestration (Kubernetes/etc), infrastructure-as-code (OpenTofu/Terraform/etc), and cloud networking - You have great instincts for observability, and your alerts or dashboards caught real problems (OpenTelemetry experience is a plus). You understand what makes for effective tooling for a rapidly scaling software team. - You're opinionated about how to automate processes, maintain complex systems, and safely ship - You believe in empowering SWE to understand and manage their deployments and infra autonomously - You rise to the challenge of working in a small team with outsize impact and visibility. Preferred: Contributions to open source infrastructure tooling (Helm charts, Terraform modules, etc.). Interest in open source build tooling (Bazel/Buck2/Nix/Guix), reproducible/hermetic/etc. builds Tech Stack We run C++ and Python code in AWS on Kubernetes and Lambda, plus AWS event streaming services; the stack includes Argo for GitOps, Kustomize/Helm. Other relevant tooling includes OTel, Terraform, and Bazel. Familiarity with patterns for distributed tracing, transactional data storage, queues, and caching is preferred. We don’t expect every engineer to come in experienced with every tool in our stack; we understand that as an experienced engineer you can pick up new technologies with time. How we build We trust you to take ownership for your area. You'll join at a pivotal moment for our platform team and shape the direction of Xona cloud infrastructure. We have a strong culture of RFCs, architecture planning, and understanding across functional units. Different engineering teams from ground software to platform engineering collaborate closely and colleagues are always happy to start a whiteboarding session with you or find 15 minutes to discuss needs and direction. We believe in teaching through code review and collaboration. For U.S. Roles: To comply with U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the United States (i.e. Green Card holder), or other protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3). For U.K. Roles: To comply with U.K. regulations, this role requires Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) checks, and successful candidates must be eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC). For Canada Roles: Successful candidates must obtain and hold a security clearance at the reliability status level, and pass security assessment for the Canadian Controlled Goods Program (CGP) and ITAR. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

Requirements

Must-haves

Xona is the navigational intelligence company bringing real-time, centimeter-level certainty to any device, anywhere on Earth.
You'll get to support a growing satellite constellation as you operate the platform serving our worldwide PNT services on AWS and on-prem, plus our observability backbone built on OpenTelemetry monitoring.
We have a great culture of collaboration across engineering, platform, software, and hardware, and incredible teams building the navigation solutions that will define new generations of technology just as GPS did.
We care about great developer experience and you'll have support to push for great internal DX while enforcing the platform constraints that meet our strict performance and reliability are central requirements.
We're solving hard engineering problems: we want you to work with all of our software teams and understand their unique needs from our platform infrastructure, rather than living in a DevOps silo.
Design for the future: as Xona's Pulsar constellation goes to 100x, new product directions are a given. You're always thinking about flexibility in our infrastructure and testing/release flows so the foundation lasts.
Be a Kubernetes technical leader: Help establish paved-road patterns for Kubernetes deployment and operations, and become a trusted source of mentorship for teams orchestrating containers across Xona.
Strong infrastructure or SRE engineer who gets excited about running systems at scale and making them better every day
Thoughtful about how testing/release workflow design affect system reliability in a microservices architecture
Experienced with container orchestration (Kubernetes/etc), infrastructure-as-code (OpenTofu/Terraform/etc), and cloud networking
You're opinionated about how to automate processes, maintain complex systems, and safely ship
You believe in empowering SWE to understand and manage their deployments and infra autonomously
You rise to the challenge of working in a small team with outsize impact and visibility.

Nice-to-haves

Strong Kubernetes experience, including production operations, deployment tooling, networking, IAM, and GitOps patterns on hyperscale vendors; on-premises experience (OpenShift/etc) is also a plus.
You have great instincts for observability, and your alerts or dashboards caught real problems (OpenTelemetry experience is a plus). You understand what makes for effective tooling for a rapidly scaling software team.
Contributions to open source infrastructure tooling (Helm charts, Terraform modules, etc.). Interest in open source build tooling (Bazel/Buck2/Nix/Guix), reproducible/hermetic/etc. builds
We don’t expect every engineer to come in experienced with every tool in our stack; we understand that as an experienced engineer you can pick up new technologies with time.
How we build
We trust you to take ownership for your area. You'll join at a pivotal moment for our platform team and shape the direction of Xona cloud infrastructure.
For U.K. Roles: To comply with U.K. regulations, this role requires Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) checks, and successful candidates must be eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC).
For Canada Roles: Successful candidates must obtain and hold a security clearance at the reliability status level, and pass security assessment for the Canadian Controlled Goods Program (CGP) and ITAR.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

awskubernetespython

Platform: ashby
Effort: quick