Operations Engineer (Starshield Products)

SpaceX•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

The Operations Engineer on SpaceX’s Starshield Products team operates and deploys AI capabilities—including models, APIs, tools, and integrations—for U.S. federal agencies. The role works closely with product, research, infrastructure, legal, and governance teams to make AI and future models useful for missions while upholding SpaceX’s standards for transparency and ethics. The engineer owns the end-to-end reliability of services supporting these missions, including service health, performance, and stability. Work includes responding to outages and customer-reported issues, improving codebases, adding observability to complex systems, addressing technical debt, and informing strategic product investments. The role includes periodic on-call rotations during business hours and occasional weekends. Extended hours and weekends may be needed, and travel to government sites may be required. The position requires obtaining and maintaining a Top Secret Security Clearance as a condition of employment.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or another STEM discipline, or at least 2 years of professional software development experience in lieu of a degree.
Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed.
May require up to 20% travel to government sites.
Must successfully obtain and maintain a Top Secret Security Clearance as a condition of employment.
Must meet applicable U.S. Government export-control requirements: be a U.S. citizen or national, lawful permanent resident, refugee, or asylee, or be eligible to obtain required U.S. Department of State authorizations.

Nice To Haves

At least 1 year of hands-on software engineering experience building scalable systems, APIs, or AI/ML applications; strong Python proficiency, with other languages a plus.
Experience with large language models, generative AI, or agentic systems in research, production, or applied engineering.
At least 1 year of experience working on enterprise applications serving more than 10,000 users across geographies and time zones.
Familiarity with government or public-sector technology environments, or regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, or infrastructure.
Ability to translate ambiguous stakeholder needs into concrete technical solutions.
Ability to write clean, maintainable, high-performance code under tight timelines.
Strong problem-solving skills and intellectual curiosity, including comfort with difficult, ambiguous challenges.
Excellent communication skills, including explaining complex technical concepts clearly and concisely to non-technical partners.
Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure; containerization such as Docker or Kubernetes; and API orchestration.

Responsibilities

Own the health, performance, and stability of integrations between frontier AI models and government systems, platforms, and data environments.
Invest in documentation, metrics, monitors, and troubleshooting tools that make services observable and operable.
Respond to automated alerts, investigate reported problems for government customers, and drive lasting fixes.
Partner with agency stakeholders and adjacent product teams to understand operational needs, share technical expertise, prototype solutions, and iterate based on real-world feedback.
Address technical debt in essential codebases and inform strategic investments in core products.
Participate in on-call rotations during business hours and occasional weekends, maintaining resilient, high-uptime production systems.

Benefits

Potential eligibility for long-term incentives in the form of company stock or long-term cash awards.
Potential discretionary bonuses.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan with the ability to purchase additional stock at a discount.
Comprehensive medical coverage.
Vision insurance.
Dental insurance.
401(k) retirement plan.
Short- and long-term disability insurance.
Life insurance.
Paid parental leave.
Various discounts and perks.
Accrual of 3 weeks of paid vacation.
Eligibility for 10 or more paid holidays per year.
Paid sick leave pursuant to company policy.