Senior Infrastructure Engineer

northwoodspace • Washington, DC

1d

About The Position

Northwood is a modern space infrastructure company focused on connecting space and Earth, aiming to make space run on Northwood's global ground network. This network supports missions for national security, global connectivity, and disaster response, ensuring their full potential and reliable daily operation. The Senior Infrastructure Engineer is a senior individual contributor role on the Northwood Infrastructure team, responsible for developing scope from ambiguous problems and serving as the final escalation point for on-call issues.

Requirements

• 5+ years of production infrastructure experience (SRE, DevOps, platform, network, or systems engineering), with demonstrated ownership of systems that were still operating well years after they were built.
• Working competence across: Linux, networking, AWS or equivalent cloud, infrastructure as code (Terraform), containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability, secrets management. Expert-level depth in at least one of these.
• Track record of taking ambiguous problems and producing designs and implementation that others can operate. Not just executing well-scoped work.
• Senior on-call experience — has been the person a team escalates to, not just a rotation participant.
• Strong code and automation skills (Python, Go, or similar). Can build tooling, not just wire together existing tools.
• Proven technical writing and mentorship. Has grown other engineers and produced documentation that teams continue to use.
• US person status (ITAR requirement).

Nice To Haves

• Deep background in one or more of the following. At the senior level, expertise in a domain is expected — the question is which one, not whether.
• Networking — enterprise (FortiGate, switching), site/ground station, or core (TGW, WireGuard, BGP, IPsec), including design across distributed sites
• Security engineering — Vault at scale, identity and IAM architecture, SIEM design and operation, hardening programs
• Compliance partnership — leading technical controls implementation for CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST 800-171, ITAR, including SSP contribution
• Observability at scale — designing SLO/SLI frameworks, operating VictoriaMetrics or Prometheus, building log pipelines in high-throughput environments
• App platform — EKS at scale, on-prem k3s, multi-cluster ArgoCD and GitOps patterns
• CI/CD and developer experience — building pipelines and platforms that other engineers depend on daily
• Cloud architecture — multi-account AWS, GovCloud, Cloudflare, hybrid and air-gapped deployments
• On-prem and hardware-adjacent ops — standing up systems in remote, austere, or regulated environments

Responsibilities

• Develop and drive scope in one or more areas of the infrastructure stack. Take ambiguous problems from framing through design, implementation, and operation.
• Set the technical direction for your areas — write RFCs, evaluate tradeoffs, and make decisions that affect how the team operates for years.
• Act as the final escalation point on-call. Drive resolution of the hardest incidents and lead post-incident reviews that produce durable fixes.
• Raise the bar through design review, code review, and mentorship. Develop other engineers by working alongside them, not just reviewing their output.
• Partner with security, compliance, product engineering, and ground station ops as a peer technical leader. Translate between infrastructure constraints and the needs of other teams.
• Identify systemic toil and underinvestment. Propose and execute the work that eliminates it, including work that spans other engineers' domains.
• Represent the infrastructure team in technical decisions across the organization. Write the documents others reference.

What This Job Offers

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