Site Reliability Engineer, GNC

Location: Hawthorne, CA

Department: Falcon and Dragon Avionics & Software Engineering

SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, GNC

SpaceX’s mission is to make humanity multiplanetary by developing fully and rapidly reusable launch systems capable of launching Starship multiple times per day while continuing to scale the Starlink constellation. To support these goals, we are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to operate and scale custom-built, mission-critical products for the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) teams.

GNC teams at SpaceX are responsible for vehicle design, trajectory design and optimization, high-fidelity vehicle simulation, software and control algorithm development, while also supporting both launch and on-orbit operations across multiple vehicle programs. In this role, you will work closely with GNC teams across SpaceX to maintain and improve a suite of critical GNC-focused tools and infrastructure that must scale reliably to enable a multiplanetary future. These systems include on-prem services, large-scale Monte Carlo simulations on our high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, automated data analysis pipelines, continuous integration systems for rocket and simulation software, GNC analysis infrastructure, and vehicle configuration verification tools.

The ideal candidate is flexible, possesses broad skills spanning product operations and software development, and thrives in a fast-paced, high-impact environment.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Deploy, upgrade, operate, and scale a suite of mission-critical GNC products and services
• Provision and maintain virtual and physical servers
• Work with SpaceX HPC team to monitor and maintain an HPC cluster consisting of tens of thousands of CPUs.
• Closely collaborate with GNC software engineers to create highly operable and maintainable products
• Monitoring and incident response for web applications and services
• Manage the underlying computational infrastructure of GNC in collaboration with IT stakeholders
• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services from whiteboard to operational
• Make data-driven recommendations for future hardware purchases
• Practice sustainable incident response and postmortems
• Provide end-user support to GNC engineering for products by becoming an expert on analysis applications and support users in troubleshooting and pointing to features
• Configure automated deployment pipelines for web apps
• Develop or improve GNC web apps and tools for better usability, maintainability, and robustness
• Demo and document new software changes such as operating system upgrades, shared filesystem changes, or major tool rollouts
• Focus on performance bottlenecks and performance improvement techniques

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems/IT, engineering, math, or scientific discipline and 2+ years of software development experience OR 4+ years of professional experience building software with site reliability or DevOps in lieu of a degree
• 1+ years of experience with Linux operating systems
• 1+ years of experience with Python and Python based development frameworks

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

• 2+ years of systems administration, site reliability engineering, or DevOps experience
• 2+ years of experience with Python and Python-based development frameworks
• 2+ years of Linux experience
• Expertise with Docker, Vagrant, and Kubernetes or similar technologies
• Extensive Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Terraform
• Experience with build systems (Make, Bazel / Pants / Buck, Gradle) and package management tools (pip, npm)
• Strong understanding of virtualization and hypervisor technologies
• Understanding of databases and data modeling
• Experience with automatically managing dozens or hundreds of servers
• Strong networking knowledge of TCP/IP
• Experience scaling web applications and optimizing applications for performance
• Experience with managing on-prem infrastructure, including direct experience managing GPU fleets
• Experience with high-performance computing systems or large-scale data analysis systems
• Must be comfortable working with mission-critical and sensitive systems, with a sense of urgency appropriate to the responsibilities
• Ability and willingness to obtain a Top Secret clearance

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS: 

• An active clearance may provide the opportunity for you to work on sensitive SpaceX missions; if so, you will be subject to pre-employment drug and random drug and alcohol testing 
• Willing to work extended hours and weekends when needed to meet critical deadlines