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Xona Space Systems is building Pulsar, an advanced satellite-based positioning and navigation (PNT) infrastructure in Low Earth Orbit designed to provide real-time, centimeter-level accuracy globally. The company is in a period of strong growth, expanding its satellite constellation and accelerating enterprise partnerships.
As a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer on the Platform Engineering team, you will own critical cloud operations and infrastructure that serve Xona's worldwide PNT services. You'll operate environments across development, staging, and production on AWS and on-premises infrastructure, using Kubernetes as the primary orchestration platform. Your work directly enables software teams to scale services, plan capacity, release frequently, and optimize costs while maintaining the strict performance and reliability standards that Xona's customers demand.
Key responsibilities include:
- Operating and managing cloud environments on AWS and Kubernetes across the full development lifecycle, from alpha to production
- Designing and implementing best-in-class observability infrastructure using OpenTelemetry, including monitoring setup, dashboards, and alerting systems that keep the platform ahead of SLOs
- Automating infrastructure processes: continuous delivery pipelines, high-availability configurations, hermetic builds, infrastructure-as-code, and zero-downtime deployments
- Establishing Kubernetes technical leadership by defining paved-road patterns for deployment and operations, and mentoring software teams on container orchestration best practices
- Collaborating across engineering teams to understand their unique infrastructure needs and embed security and infrastructure best practices into their workflows
- Planning for scale: as the Pulsar constellation grows 100x, designing flexible infrastructure and testing/release flows that will support future product directions
The platform team operates with a strong culture of RFCs, architecture planning, and cross-functional collaboration. You'll work in a small team with outsize impact and visibility, partnering closely with ground software engineers, hardware teams, and other functional units. The company values great developer experience, robust testing and monitoring culture over firefighting, and empowering software engineers to understand and manage their own deployments autonomously.
Tech stack includes C++ and Python running on AWS and Kubernetes, AWS Lambda and event streaming services, Argo for GitOps, Kustomize and Helm for configuration management, Terraform and OpenTofu for infrastructure-as-code, Bazel for builds, and OTel for observability. Experience with distributed tracing, transactional data storage, queues, and caching patterns is preferred but not required—the company expects experienced engineers to pick up new technologies.
Qualifications and Requirements:
- Strong infrastructure or SRE background with demonstrated excitement about running systems at scale and continuous improvement
- Production-grade Kubernetes experience including operations, deployment tooling, networking, IAM, and GitOps patterns on hyperscale cloud vendors; on-premises experience (OpenShift, etc.) is a plus
- Strong experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, OpenTofu), and cloud networking
- Thoughtful understanding of how testing and release workflow design impact system reliability in microservices architectures
- Excellent instincts for observability; demonstrated ability to design alerts and dashboards that catch real problems (OpenTelemetry experience is a plus)
- Proficiency writing quality software in at least one general-purpose language
- Opinionated about process automation, maintaining complex systems, and safe deployment practices
- Belief in empowering software engineers to understand and manage their deployments and infrastructure autonomously
- Ability to thrive in a small team environment with high visibility and impact
- Preferred: contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling (Helm charts, Terraform modules); interest in open-source build tooling (Bazel, Buck2, Nix, Guix) and reproducible/hermetic builds
U.S. Citizenship Requirement: To comply with U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident (Green Card holder), or other protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).
