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Northwood Space is a modern space infrastructure company building a global network of phased array ground stations that enable real-time, reliable communication for satellite missions including national security, global connectivity, and disaster response. The company designs, builds, and rapidly deploys vertically integrated systems that power next-generation space missions.
You will own the patterns and frameworks that Northwood's engineers use to build, test, and release software across FPGA, embedded, DSP, cloud, and ground teams. This is a player-coach role combining hands-on technical work with team leadership. You'll lead a small team of internal tooling and developer experience engineers while staying actively involved in code, sprint planning, and people management.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning build, test, and release frameworks across Northwood's repositories, including build systems, GitLab CI templates, artifact management, and versioning conventions
- Creating paved paths like reusable pipelines and build components with fast checks that fail early
- Defining guardrails for repo owners (minimum pipeline stages, signing, promotion gates) and making the compliant path the easiest path
- Partnering with domain leads to understand build and release friction, prioritize tooling roadmap items, and measure adoption
- Owning internal software development: intake, prioritization, delivery, and lifecycle of applications Northwood builds for its own use across engineering and business functions
- Collaborating across teams to contribute shared frameworks, components, and engineering capacity
- Leading the Development team with sprint planning, design and code reviews, and hands-on contributions
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 8+ years of software or platform engineering experience, including 2+ years leading a team or workstream as a tech lead
- Demonstrated ownership of a CI/CD or build framework adopted by multiple teams with different toolchains, including evidence of driving adoption and making tradeoffs
- Experience building developer platforms or paved paths for engineering disciplines you weren't part of (e.g., software tooling consumed by firmware, hardware, or data teams)
- Strong proficiency in at least one systems language (Rust, Go, or C++) and Python
- Hands-on experience with GitLab CI or equivalent, container builds, and artifact management
- Ability to write clear technical standards and get engineers outside your team to adopt them
- Experience delivering internal applications or tools to non-engineering users, including scoping requirements with stakeholders who don't write software
Preferred qualifications include production experience with Nix for reproducible builds, monorepo tooling and build caching at scale, integrating FPGA/embedded/cross-compilation toolchains into CI systems, releasing software to disconnected or bandwidth-constrained edge environments, software supply chain security (artifact signing, SBOMs, CVE automation, provenance), operating in compliance-driven environments (CMMC, NIST 800-171, FedRAMP), prior player-coach or TLM experience, full-stack experience for internal application work, and experience with build-vs-buy decisions for internal tooling.
Note: Due to U.S. Government space technology export regulations (ITAR), candidates must be U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, protected individuals as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
