Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Job Overview

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

Key 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.

Required 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).

About Northwood

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company focused on connecting space and Earth. The world runs on space. Space will run on Northwood. Our global ground network ensures that missions ranging from national security, to global connectivity, to disaster response can unlock their full potential and operate every day without fail.

Benefits

Compensation at Northwood Space is based on role, level, location, and alignment with market data. Individual base pay is determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary depending on job-related skills, education, experience, and technical expertise. In addition to base salary, Northwood Space offers long-term incentives such as company stock options and discretionary performance bonuses. Benefits include equity, comprehensive health care, flexible vacation, retirement savings plans, and opportunities for professional development.