📋 Job Overview
Based out of Rocket Lab's global headquarters in Long Beach, CA, we are looking to hire a Senior DevOps Engineer I. In this role you will build, operate, and improve the observability platform that gives our teams clear, actionable insight into the health and performance of mission-critical systems. This role sits within the DevSecOps organization and focuses on reliable, scalable telemetry collection, storage, visualization, and alerting across our environments.
🏢 About Rocket Lab
Rocket Lab is the end-to-end space company building rockets, spacecraft, and critical subsystems that keep the world connected, protected, expand humanity’s reach to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. We move fast, build real hardware for meaningful missions, and make the impossible routine. Come shape the future with us.
🎯 The Role
In this role you will build, operate, and improve the observability platform that gives our teams clear, actionable insight into the health and performance of mission-critical systems. This role sits within the DevSecOps organization and focuses on reliable, scalable telemetry collection, storage, visualization, and alerting across our environments.
✅ Key Responsibilities
- Build, operate, and continuously improve the organization's observability stack, including Grafana, Grafana Mimir, kube-prometheus-stack, and Grafana Alloy.
- Design and maintain scalable metrics collection, ingestion, retention, and query patterns for Kubernetes and cloud-based workloads.
- Develop and maintain Grafana dashboards that provide actionable insights to engineering teams and leadership.
- Design, tune, and maintain alerting and notification workflows that reduce noise and enable timely, effective incident response.
- Partner with engineering teams to define meaningful service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and monitoring standards.
- Improve observability coverage by identifying telemetry gaps, analyzing trends, and implementing durable instrumentation and monitoring improvements.
- Integrate AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail telemetry into the observability platform to support operational visibility, security monitoring, and troubleshooting.
- Manage observability infrastructure through version-controlled, automated deployments using Terraform, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Drive continuous improvement through data-driven analysis of platform reliability, telemetry quality, dashboard adoption, and alert effectiveness.
- Troubleshoot complex monitoring, telemetry, and alerting issues across AWS, and GCP environments.
- Work with development teams through code reviews and integrated pipelines to ensure observability is built in from the start.
- Design and implement AI agents that detect, analyze, and troubleshoot software testing failures with minimal human intervention
- Build and maintain AI-powered quality automation ecosystems that monitor CI/CD pipelines across multiple programs and platforms
📌 Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or other technical discipline
- 5+ years of experience in DevOps, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, or a related infrastructure discipline
- Hands-on experience operating and improving production observability and monitoring platforms
- Demonstrated expertise in AI/ML technologies with hands-on experience building AI-driven automation systems
- Experience with AWS and GCP cloud services
- Experience managing infrastructure as code with Terraform and collaborating through Git-based workflows
- U.S. citizenship is required, due to program requirements
⭐ Desirable Experience
- Experience with Splunk
- Experience administering and configuring data visualization and analytics platforms, such as Grafana
- Administration experience with Time Series Databases, such as Grafana Mimir
- Strong problem-solving skills with an automation-first mindset and a track record of improving reliability in production environments
- Experience deploying and managing Prometheus-based monitoring with kube-prometheus-stack
- Experience configuring and operating Grafana Alloy for telemetry collection and forwarding
- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipeline automation tools, DevSecOps practices, and Kubernetes operations
- Experience with cloud networking concepts and troubleshooting
- Experience building dashboards using tools like Grafana, Kibana, or custom visualization frameworks
- Knowledge of security testing tools and DevSecOps security practices
- Aerospace background supporting satellite, spacecraft, constellation, or launch vehicle ground/mission operations
- Expertise in Git-based workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes orchestration
- Experience with observability and monitoring tools
- Experience with Kubecost
- Operating and building solutions within GovCloud environment
🎁 Benefits
Anticipated annual equity grant value is designed around function, level, experience, and other factors; realized value depends on vesting and stock-price performance.
Join one of the world's fastest-growing space companies and own a piece of it. In addition to competitive base pay, you'll receive company stock as part of your total compensation package, giving you a direct stake in our success. As we expand to new launch sites, groundbreaking missions, and global markets, your ownership has the opportunity to grow alongside the company.
Our comprehensive benefits package includes our industry-leading Employee Stock Purchase Program (with a 15% discount on company stock), top-tier medical plans (HMO, PPO, and a zero cost HDHP option with a significant HSA company contribution), dental and vision coverage, paid vacation and sick time, 11 paid holidays, flexible spending and dependent care accounts, paid parental leave, disability and life insurance, and a 401(k) retirement plan with company match.
Additional perks include subsidized EV charging, onsite fitness centers (where available), discounted gym memberships, complimentary snacks and beverages, 50% employee discount on our popular merch store, and a variety of other employee discounts.
🛂 Visa & Eligibility
To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Rocket Lab Employees must be a U.S. citizen, lawful U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State and/or the U.S. Department of Commerce, as applicable.
