Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Torrance, CA

Compensation: $140K – $170K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Role:

Northwood is looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to architect and lead the monitoring and reliability systems that keep satellites connected to Earth. As we rapidly scale our ground station network across multiple continents, you'll design and build the observability infrastructure that ensures our space communications systems operate 24/7 for customers ranging from commercial satellite operators to national security missions.

This is a high-impact leadership role where you'll architect global-scale reliability platforms while mentoring junior engineers and establishing SRE practices across the organization. You'll work directly with our founding engineering team and department heads to define the monitoring, alerting, and deployment strategies that will scale with us from startup to enterprise. If you're excited about space technology and want to architect infrastructure that directly supports mission-critical satellite operations while building and leading technical teams, this role offers that opportunity.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and maintain enterprise observability stack (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Vector, VictoriaMetrics) monitoring ground stations, satellite communications, and multi-region AWS infrastructure

• Design SRE practices, error budgets, and SLO/SLI frameworks for mission-critical satellite systems with 99.9%+ uptime requirements

• Build advanced AWS infrastructure with Terraform, implementing multi-region reliability, automated scaling, and disaster recovery for ground station operations

• Lead CI/CD pipeline architecture using GitLab and ArgoCD with advanced deployment strategies for mission-critical software releases

• Mentor junior engineers and establish reliability standards across the growing engineering organization

• Design comprehensive Kubernetes deployments with Helm, focusing on high availability and zero-downtime operations

• Lead incident response, conduct post-mortems, and drive systematic reliability improvements

Basic Qualifications

• 5-8 years of production infrastructure and SRE experience with demonstrated leadership in reliability improvements and team mentorship

• Expert-level experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration in large-scale production environments

• Strong background in infrastructure as code (Terraform) and advanced CI/CD practices with experience mentoring others on these technologies

• Advanced AWS experience including multi-region architectures, networking, security, and cost optimization, with demonstrated ability to architect complex cloud solutions

• Proven track record of leading technical projects from conception to production in fast-moving, high-growth environments

• Deep understanding of SRE principles, error budgets, SLOs/SLIs, and experience implementing reliability frameworks across engineering organizations

Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience architecting and scaling observability tools (Vector, Loki, Grafana, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics) in high-throughput environments

• Advanced experience with HashiCorp Vault, Okta, and enterprise identity/secrets management systems including policy design and implementation

• Previous experience scaling infrastructure and leading technical teams at high-growth companies (startup to 500+ employees)

• AWS Professional certification or equivalent demonstrated expertise with advanced cloud networking, security, and compliance frameworks

• Strong Linux system administration and networking expertise with experience troubleshooting complex distributed systems

• Background in aerospace, telecommunications, defense contracting, or other mission-critical, highly regulated industries

• Experience with ITAR, NIST 800-171, or other defense/aerospace compliance requirements

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