Infrastructure Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Torrance, CA, Washington D.C.

Compensation: $101,200 – $137,920

Employment Type: FullTime

About Northwood:

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company focused on connecting space and Earth. The world runs on space. Space will run on Northwood. Our global ground network ensures that missions ranging from national security, to global connectivity, to disaster response can unlock their full potential and operate every day without fail.

Infrastructure Engineer

Core individual contributor role on the Northwood Infrastructure team. Operates defined scope independently with a spike in at least one area of depth.

Responsibilities

• Own and operate one or more components of the Northwood infrastructure stack (CI/CD, app platform, cloud/IaC, networking, observability, security tooling). Take a defined scope and execute without ongoing oversight.

• Build and maintain infrastructure as code. Default to Terraform, Helm, and GitOps.

• Carry on-call for the infra stack. Handle the majority of incidents to resolution independently.

• Run post-incident reviews for incidents you owned.

• Partner with security engineering and compliance on controls implementation in your areas - Vault policies, IAM boundaries, SIEM coverage, evidence collection.

• Treat toil as a design signal. When manual work repeats, automate it or fix the underlying system.

• Write and maintain runbooks, design docs, and component documentation. Keep them current with the system.

• Collaborate across infra, product engineering, and ground station operations on cross-cutting work.

Basic Qualifications

• 3-5 years of production infrastructure experience (SRE, DevOps, platform, network, or systems engineering).

• Working competence across: Linux, networking fundamentals, AWS or equivalent cloud, infrastructure as code (Terraform), containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling. Not expert in all — competent enough to operate and contribute.

• Demonstrated ownership of a production system end-to-end: design, implementation, operation.

• On-call experience in a production environment with measurable reliability outcomes.

• Comfortable in code (Python, Go, or similar) for automation, tooling, and integration work.

• Strong technical writing — design docs, runbooks, post-mortems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong background in one or more of the following. We're hiring generalists with a spike, not specialists — depth in one area weighs heavily, but not at the cost of breadth across the basics.

• Networking — enterprise (FortiGate, switching), site/ground station, or core (TGW, WireGuard, BGP, IPsec)

• Security engineering — Vault, identity (Okta, IAM), SIEM operations, hardening

• Compliance partnership — implementing technical controls for CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST 800-171, ITAR

• Observability at scale — VictoriaMetrics or Prometheus, Grafana, alerting design, log pipelines (Vector, Loki)

• App platform — EKS at scale, on-prem k3s, ArgoCD and GitOps patterns

• CI/CD and developer experience — pipeline design, scanning and linting, release engineering

• Cloud architecture — multi-account AWS, GovCloud, Cloudflare

• On-prem and hardware-adjacent ops — bringing up systems in remote or austere environments, ground stations, edge sites

Additional Information:

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Northwood is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Northwood is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.