Senior Platform Engineer (DevX)

About the role

K2 is building the largest and highest-power satellites ever flown, unlocking performance levels previously out of reach across every orbit. Backed by over $1 billion in total funding from leading investors including Altimeter Capital, ICONIQ, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and T. Rowe Price - and with over $1 billion in signed contracts across commercial and US government customers, we're mass-producing the highest-power satellite platforms ever built for missions from LEO to deep space.

The rise of heavy-lift launch vehicles is shifting the industry from an era of mass constraint to one of mass abundance, and we believe this new era demands a fundamentally different class of spacecraft. Engineered to survive the harshest radiation environments and to fully capitalize on today's and tomorrow's massive rockets, K2 satellites deliver unmatched capability at constellation scale and across multiple orbits.

With multiple launches in 2027 and plans to scale to 100 satellites a year, we're Building Bigger - helping develop the solar system and build toward a Kardashev Type II (K2) civilization. If you are a motivated individual who thrives in a fast-paced environment and you're excited about contributing to the success of a high-growth Series D-funded company, we'd love for you to apply.

The Role

Our enterprise software team builds the digital backbone that powers K2 Space's ($1B raised to date) satellite design, manufacturing, and mission operations. We develop tools that connect engineering, production, and mission control into a seamless ecosystem - enabling our hardware to get from concept to orbit faster than ever before.

As we continue to grow, we're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer on our Enterprise Information Systems team, you must possess strong technical skills and a sense of empathy for your fellow engineers. You will work closely with other talented engineers, architects and senior stakeholders to design, implement, and deliver on our roadmap.

Our Ideal Candidate

• Distills application development best practices into repeatable low friction patterns to enable users from multiple backgrounds to build high-quality applications and services
• Practices surgical precision in feature development, delivering high value while avoiding complexity that delays or bloats
• Delivers work with excellence including readable code, automated tests, clear documentation, consistent maintenance, and polished observability
• Intuitively understands manufacturing domain functionality, service identity, and secure communication with a keen ability to simplify them
• Understands the importance of resilience and reliability in production operations and upgrades

Responsibilities

• Build consistent application patterns to deploy to Amazon EKS enabling both AI-assisted general application development and specialized application development work
• Promoting AI adoption in a secure and consistent model while supporting AI operational needs.
• Establishing AI guardrails, observability and governance within the context of software development ensuring AI assisted application development will be secured with industry best practices
• Build guard rails and out-of-the-box platform functionalities for golden path deployment model and accelerate applications go-live with low friction tooling
• Lead long term developer experience road map incorporating capabilities from multiple disciplines within software industry
• Engineer resilient traffic paths (timeouts, retries, circuit breaking, failure isolation) and harden them via chaos tests, automated remediation, and MTTR reduction
• Incorporate observability services for end-to-end application monitoring and alerting
• Provide approachable docs & diagnostics (guides, diagrams, 'why can't this connect?' flows) to shorten support loops
• Optimize performance & cost (latency budgets, cross-AZ transfer, IP consumption, LB efficiency) and act on anomalies
• Steward code lifecycle and adoption including versioning, safe migrations, deprecations, usage telemetry, and proactive pruning of unused resources
• Mentor engineers and partner with adjacent teams to embed application abstractions into golden paths, raising organizational fluency and consistency in software engineering
• Build automated policies and processes to ensure good code deployment practices, code hygiene, good code test practices

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building developer tooling and deployment patterns
• Comfortable with performing PoC to evaluate new technology: AI Platform, AI models, introducing new developer experience products.
• Proficiency in at least one language (Go, TypeScript, Python, C#) and disciplined SCM workflows (branching, reviews, automated gates)
• Deep working knowledge architecture knowledge of designing, developing and deploying application to Amazon EKS
• Deep working knowledge of CI/CD build pipeline with Github or Gitlab
• Competence leveraging observability & SLOs (metrics, tracing, structured logs, L4/L7 telemetry, end-to-end request path, visibility into applied policies, SLI/SLO definition & enforcement)
• Experience with using Terraform or CDK, GitOps (GH Actions, Gitlab CI), progressive/canary rollouts, policy-as-code integration
• Experience with AI-assisted development process and understand how to navigate benefits and challenges of leveraging AI to accelerate deliverables

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary range for this role is $165,000 - $200,000 + equity in the company
• Salary will be based on several factors including, but not limited to: knowledge and skills, education, and experience level
• Comprehensive benefits package including paid time off, medical/dental/vision/ coverage, life insurance, paid parental leave, and many other perks

If you don't meet 100% of the preferred skills and experience, we encourage you to still apply! Building a spacecraft unlike any other requires a team unlike any other and non-traditional career twists and turns are encouraged!

Export Compliance

As defined in the ITAR, "U.S. Persons" include U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (i.e., Green Card holders), and certain protected individuals (e.g., refugees/asylees, American Samoans). Please consult with a knowledgeable advisor if you are unsure whether you are a "U.S. Person."

The person hired for this role will have access to information and items controlled by U.S. export control regulations, including the export control regulations outlined in the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). The person hired for this role must therefore either be a "U.S. person" as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.15 or otherwise eligible for a federally issued export control license.