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ICEYE is seeking a Forward Deployed Backend/DevOps Engineer to serve as the infrastructure and backend backbone for defense and intelligence customers. You will deploy ICEYE's intelligence platform into secure, often air-gapped environments and design high-performance backend systems that move satellite data at scale. This is a hybrid role with approximately 50% on-site time at customer locations, requiring eligibility for national and NATO security clearances and native-level Portuguese language proficiency.
You will own platform deployment and operations, installing and upgrading Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications in customer environments (both cloud and on-premises). You'll build infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Ansible, and design CI/CD pipelines that function without external internet access, including offline registries and artifact mirroring. You'll troubleshoot deployment and production issues in disconnected environments across all layers from application to networking.
On the backend systems side, you'll design and build APIs, services, and data pipelines handling large volumes of SAR imagery and intelligence data with low latency. You'll connect ICEYE systems to customer C4ISR infrastructure and intelligence tools through robust integrations. Database design and performance at production scale (PostgreSQL, MongoDB) will be your responsibility, including schemas, indexing, tuning, replication, and backup strategies. You'll apply caching, queueing, and horizontal scaling patterns deliberately, with capacity planning for fixed on-premises hardware.
Reliability and security are critical. You'll build monitoring, logging, and alerting systems that work in restricted environments, harden deployments to meet customer security constraints, and own backup, recovery, and upgrade paths for systems that cannot go down. You'll run infrastructure behind AI workloads including model serving, vector databases, and GPU nodes.
Customer engagement is integral to the role. You'll work embedded with intelligence analysts, operators, and customer IT teams to understand operational and infrastructure requirements. You'll rapidly prototype and iterate to address immediate operational needs, conduct hands-on training for customer administrators, and feed deployment experience back to ICEYE's product and engineering teams.
Required: 5+ years hands-on backend engineering building and operating production systems at scale; strong Python programming with typed, tested services and async API comfort; proven experience designing high-performance backend systems (APIs, distributed services, messaging, caching, databases); production experience in both cloud (AWS) and on-premises environments; deep Docker and Kubernetes expertise; observability as a habit; infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD experience; PostgreSQL and/or MongoDB at production scale; builder mindset; strong communication and customer engagement skills; fluent English; willingness to travel 40-60% to regional customer sites.
Nice-to-have: defense/intelligence/government operational environment experience; on-prem data center and air-gapped network deployment experience; event streaming and high-throughput data systems (Kafka); advanced Kubernetes knowledge; security hardening and accreditation experience; geospatial data or satellite imagery familiarity; AI/LLM infrastructure experience; AI-assisted development tool proficiency; defense tech company background.
