Infrastructure Engineer - Early Career

northwoodspace • Washington, DC

1d

About The Position

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. This is an entry-level role on the Northwood Infrastructure team, offering broad exposure across the stack with guided growth into one or more areas of depth.

Requirements

• 0-2 years of professional experience in infrastructure, platform, DevOps, SRE, networking, or systems engineering.
• Strong interest in infrastructure engineering and a clear willingness to go deep on one or more facets of the stack.
• Working familiarity with Linux, networking, and at least one major cloud provider.
• Some experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar) and version control with Git.
• Comfortable reading and writing code in at least one language (Python, Go, Bash, or similar).
• Strong written communication. Able to describe problems, document work, and ask good questions.

Nice To Haves

• A demonstrated interest in one or more of the following through coursework, side projects, prior internships, or homelab work. We're looking for genuine curiosity and a track record of following through on learning.
• Networking — enterprise, site, or core (Routing, VPNs, firewalls, switching)
• Security engineering — Vault, identity and access management, SIEM, hardening
• Compliance — CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST 800-171, ITAR
• Observability — Prometheus or VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, log pipelines
• App platform — Kubernetes, Podman, ArgoCD, GitOps
• CI/CD — pipeline design, scanning and linting, release engineering
• Cloud architecture — AWS, GovCloud, Cloudflare
• On-prem and edge — bringing up systems in remote or austere environments

Responsibilities

• Learn the Northwood stack in depth — AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Vault, observability, networking — and identify one or more areas to go deeper in over time.
• Execute scoped infrastructure tasks. With guidance from senior engineers, execute work that is reviewed and merged without significant rework.
• Contribute to infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, observability configuration, and operational tooling across the stack.
• Shadow on-call rotations. Triage incidents and escalate as needed to senior engineers.
• Participate in post-incident reviews to build operational judgment.
• Write clear runbooks, component docs, and design notes for work you own. Documentation is part of the deliverable.
• Pair with senior engineers on larger projects to build pattern recognition for how infrastructure decisions are made and tradeoffs evaluated.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed