Infrastructure Engineer

Vibrant Planet•Truckee, CA

20h•Remote

About The Position

The Infrastructure Engineer is a hands-on engineering role responsible for designing, scaling, and maintaining the platform that powers Vibrant Planet's mission-critical geospatial and AI/ML workloads. This role is a key contributor on a small, high-impact team of engineers and scientists working on some of the most pressing climate-related challenges facing the world today. The infra team owns Vibrant Planet's Infrastructure as Code strategy and sets the standard for how the company builds, deploys, and operates cloud infrastructure across both AWS and the managed SaaS platforms that host our application tier (e.g. Fly.io , Crunchy Bridge). We orchestrate IaC with a component-based framework (currently Atmos) and value strong IaC fundamentals over any single tool. The role is fully remote and requires the ability to work effectively across a distributed team.

Requirements

5+ years of software or infrastructure engineering experience, with at least 3 years focused on cloud infrastructure or platform engineering.
Deep proficiency with Terraform and/or OpenTofu , including module authoring, state management, and multi-environment patterns.
Strong experience with AWS , including core services such as EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, and related networking and security primitives.
Experience managing containerized infrastructure with Docker and Kubernetes (Helm-based deployments).
Proficiency with Python for infrastructure automation, tooling, and scripting.
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for infrastructure workflows.
Experience operating Postgres in production, including high availability configurations and performance tuning.
Familiarity with observability tooling, particularly Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, alerting, and dashboards.
Strong communication skills; you have the ability to communicate effortlessly, discussing complex technical concepts with engineers and non-engineers alike.
Collaborative and supportive team player with a desire to enrich our engineering culture.
Eagerness to learn, think creatively, and share knowledge with others.
Ability to write understandable, testable infrastructure code with an eye toward maintainability and long-term operability.
Proactive and empathetic mindset — you love to roll up your sleeves to fix problems.
Must be authorized to work in the U.S. without visa sponsorship

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with Atmos as an IaC orchestration framework (or demonstrated equivalent experience with component-based Terraform orchestration at scale).
Hands-on experience with Fly.io and/or Crunchy Bridge (or comparable managed PaaS and managed-Postgres providers).
Experience with OpenTofu migration or open-source IaC ecosystem contributions.
Familiarity with geospatial or scientific computing workloads (e.g., large raster/vector data processing pipelines).
Experience with cost optimization tooling and FinOps practices on AWS.
Exposure to data platform infrastructure (e.g., Airflow, Spark, or similar distributed compute frameworks).
Certifications in AWS (e.g., Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer).

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure on AWS using Infrastructure as Code best practices.
Own and evolve our Atmos-based IaC framework, including stack configuration, component architecture, and environment lifecycle management.
Operate and maintain the managed-SaaS platforms hosting our application tier — including application deploys and reliability on Fly.io and managed Postgres on Crunchy Bridge — covering deployment pipelines, secrets, scaling, backups, and performance.
Develop and maintain Terraform and OpenTofu modules and components, ensuring reusability, consistency, and DRY configuration across environments.
Lead and mature our CI/CD infrastructure pipelines using GitHub Actions, enabling reliable and automated infrastructure deployments.
Manage containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes (Helm), supporting our engineering and data science teams.
Build and maintain observability infrastructure using Prometheus and Grafana to ensure system reliability, performance visibility, and rapid incident response.
Collaborate closely with engineers, scientists, and other stakeholders to translate requirements into robust infrastructure solutions.
Lead and participate in development lifecycle activities including design, code review, testing, and production releases.
Mentor and support other engineers, deeply reviewing infrastructure code and elevating engineering standards across the team.
Contribute to our evolving engineering culture, standards, tooling, and processes.
Comply with Vibrant Planet’s Information Security Policy and the full security responsibilities detailed in the Employee Handbook, including complete required security training, safeguard customer and company data, keep credentials secure, and report suspected security incidents or policy violations through established channels.
Follow secure development practices, adhere to established change management processes for production systems, protect the confidentiality and integrity of customer data, and promptly address security vulnerabilities in your area of responsibility.