Software Engineer III - Core Platform Infrastructure

BLUE ORIGIN•Seattle, WA

2d•$164,652 - $230,513

About The Position

This role is part of Enterprise Technology (ET), where we’re developing the digital infrastructure needed to build the road to space, with an emphasis on digital capabilities required to advance Blue Origin’s mission. Enterprise Technology is the center of excellence for digital technology at Blue Origin, providing oversight and governance to align technology and business strategies. We're a diverse team of collaborators, doers, and problem-solvers relentlessly committed to a culture of safety and innovation. This position will directly impact the history of space exploration and requires your dedication and keen attention to ensure safe and repeatable spaceflight. Join us in lowering the cost of access to space, fulfilling Blue Origin's vision of millions living and working in space to benefit Earth. This is a platform infrastructure role — you'll build and operate the thing that builds the thing. We are looking for a skilled and motivated Software Engineer III to join our Platform Infrastructure team. We own and operate the Kubernetes clusters that the rest of the company deploys onto, and we build the paved road that gets teams there — reusable Kustomize configurations, GitLab CI/CD pipeline templates, and Terraform modules that other teams adopt to build, ship, and run their own services. We don't own those services; we own the cluster underneath them and the templates and guardrails that make deploying to it fast, consistent, and safe. You'll join a high-impact team whose customers are other engineering teams across Blue Origin — the leverage is enormous, because every improvement to a template or cluster capability multiplies across everyone who builds on it. At Blue Origin we rely heavily on Kubernetes for rapid software development and deployment; a candidate for this role needs deep, hands-on experience running Kubernetes clusters in production — operating the platform itself, not just deploying onto it. If you're passionate about building resilient, self-service infrastructure and paved-road tooling — and want your work to matter — this is your team. We build with an AI-assisted mindset — using tools like Claude Code, Codex, and other leading AI assistants to move faster, think bigger, and tackle harder problems. AI is a first-class part of how we design, automate, debug, and review here — not an afterthought. You'll be expected to adopt, evaluate, and advocate for AI tooling responsibly, with a clear eye on production reliability, security, and governance. The best engineers on our team don't just use AI — they know when to trust it, when to question it, and when to override it. The clusters we operate and the templates we publish underpin how software is built, shipped, and run across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and mission operations. When we improve a pipeline template or a cluster capability, that improvement lands for every team that builds on it. We're continuously raising the bar on the paved road: reusable delivery pipelines, resilient container platforms, and observability that teams inherit by default. At this scale, reliability and scalability aren't aspirational — they're the baseline. The infrastructure you help build directly determines how fast Blue Origin moves.

Requirements

5+ years of professional experience across software development, infrastructure engineering, and production operations.
Hands-on experience operating and administering Kubernetes clusters in production — not merely deploying workloads onto them — including cluster lifecycle and upgrades, node and control-plane management, RBAC and multi-tenancy, cluster networking (CNI, ingress, DNS, network policy), add-ons and controllers, and resource/quota management.
Experience with GitOps-based delivery (e.g., Flux or Argo CD) and policy-as-code enforcement (e.g., Kyverno or OPA/Gatekeeper).
Experience authoring reusable infrastructure as a product — Terraform modules, Kustomize configurations, and CI/CD pipeline templates that other teams consume — with versioning and backward compatibility in mind.
Hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native infrastructure, including core networking (VPC, subnets, security groups).
Experience analyzing and troubleshooting distributed systems.
Experience running production systems on-call — incident response, blameless postmortems, and observability (metrics, logging, and distributed tracing).
Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g., Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, or .NET), and openness to learning the languages we use day to day (Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python).
Familiarity with, or willingness to adopt, AI-assisted development tools — with sound judgment about when to trust, question, or override what they produce.
Strong communication skills — you can articulate complex technical concepts clearly, engage constructively in design discussions, and own outcomes.
Ability to earn trust, maintain positive and professional relationships, and contribute to a culture of inclusion.
Must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Nice To Haves

Multi-cluster, or multi-account / multi-environment, operations at scale.
Experience with a service mesh such as Istio — traffic management, mTLS, and observability at the mesh layer.
A demonstrated habit of using AI-assisted tools in your workflow, and judgment evaluating AI-generated code and configuration for correctness, security, and production readiness.
A habit of sharing knowledge through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing.
Experience in aerospace, manufacturing, or supply chain domains is a plus but not required.

Responsibilities

Own and operate the Kubernetes clusters that teams across the company deploy onto — capacity, upgrades, security, and multi-tenancy.
Design, build, and maintain the reusable templates that make up the paved road: Kustomize bases and overlays, GitLab CI/CD pipeline templates, and Terraform modules, delivered and continuously reconciled through GitOps (Flux), that other teams adopt to deploy and operate their own services.
Enforce cluster guardrails as policy-as-code (Kyverno) — multi-tenancy boundaries, security baselines, and safe defaults that consuming teams inherit automatically.
Treat these templates as a product — version them, document them, gather feedback from the teams that consume them, and evolve them with backward compatibility in mind.
Configure, deploy, scale, and administer the open source and commercial software that powers the cluster and the paved road.
Own the reliability of the cluster and the shared tooling across their lifecycle — from design through operation and refinement.
Maintain and improve cluster health by monitoring availability, capacity, and system-health signals, and acting on what the data shows.
Participate in sustainable on-call and incident response for cluster- and platform-level incidents, conduct root cause analysis, and help lead blameless postmortems that turn incidents into lasting fixes. The cluster sits in the critical path of every team that deploys on it, so its reliability is non-negotiable.
Establish and uphold observability best practices — and make them easy for consuming teams to inherit by default through the templates you provide.
Drive the sustainable scaling of the platform through automation, relentlessly reducing toil for both our team and the teams we serve.
Build self-service capabilities and paved-road defaults that let other teams deploy quickly and safely without hand-holding or manual intervention.
Write well-tested, maintainable code and champion quality through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD best practices.
Identify and resolve complex issues across the stack — from cluster and platform behavior to pipeline configuration and network paths.
Contribute to team standards, runbooks, and documentation that raise the technical bar across the team.
Partner closely with Senior and Principal Engineers to deliver on the team's ambitious roadmap.
Work cross-functionally with product managers, the teams that build on our platform, and engineers across the company to translate needs into reliable platform capabilities.
Actively participate in design reviews, sprint ceremonies, and technical discussions — your voice and perspective matter here.
Raise the bar in code and design reviews, and share your knowledge and skills to strengthen the team — while learning from the engineers around you.