Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About This Role

At Varda Space Industries, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in space and materials science - and we're looking for bold engineers to help us get there. As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you'll be critical in building, scaling, and maintaining the infrastructure that powers our systems on Earth, in orbit, and everything in between.

We are looking for an experienced engineer with deep working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized technologies. You are a hands-on operator and builder who applies first-principles thinking to both software delivery (DevOps) and production reliability (SRE), and thrives in complex, mission-critical environments.

In this role, you will

• Solve challenging technical problems across a wide range of modern technologies.
• Apply a software engineering mindset to automate operations and improve system reliability, scalability, and resilience
• Design and build infrastructure that enables rapid development - from cloud-based services to embedded software running on spacecraft.
• Shape Varda's infrastructure strategy and drive operational excellence across containerized and modernized environments.

Responsibilities

• Deploy, maintain, and operate mission-critical applications and infrastructure supporting spacecraft and company-wide systems.
• Build and evolve Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks using tools such as Terraform
• Implement and operate observability systems (metrics, logging, tracing) and actionable alerting.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to enable safe, repeatable, and rapid deployments.
• Partner with software and hardware engineers to deliver highly operable, reliable, and scalable systems and pipelines, ensuring they have the tools and infrastructure needed for rapid iteration.
• Identify, analyze, and resolve system bottlenecks and reliability risks; perform performance tuning and implement long-term stability improvements.
• Respond to and resolve production incidents; perform root cause analysis and drive corrective actions through blameless postmortems.
• Rotate through the team's on-call schedule to keep critical systems healthy and responsive.
• Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed
• Occasionally travel to customer sites and other Varda locations to troubleshoot, deploy, or test critical infrastructure.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related STEM field with 5+ years of Site Reliability Engineering experience, or 7+ years of progressive experience in DevOps, SRE, or Systems Engineering in lieu of a degree.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform to automate server provisioning and configuration management
• Experience operating Kubernetes or similar container orchestration platforms in production environments.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, InfluxDB, or similar technologies.
• Knowledge of software-defined networking (VPC, Subnets, Firewalls, VPNs, etc.)
• Python, Bash, PowerShell (or similar) scripting experience
• Positive and strong communication skills, both written and oral

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience in provisioning and managing scalable Azure cloud infrastructure using native tools and best practices
• Experience implementing configuration management, provisioning, and workflow automation solutions via Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and GitOps (e.g., Ansible, Salt, ArgoCD, etc).
• Strong understanding of Linux systems and container runtimes (e.g., containerd, Docker)
• Experience with GPU workloads or high-throughput computing.
• Hands-on experience operating and optimizing High Performance Computing (HPC) environments, including workload schedulers such as Slurm (e.g., queue/partition design, fair-share scheduling, and cluster resource management).
• Experience with hybrid environments (cloud + on-prem or edge systems)
• Experience debugging distributed systems at scale (network, storage, latency)
• Experience with databases and data modeling

Pay Range

• Site Reliability Engineer: $153,000.00 - $185,000.00/per year
• This role is on-site in El Segundo, CA
• Leveling and base salary are determined by job-related skills, education level, experience level, and job performance
• You will be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of stock options and/or long-term cash awards

ITAR Requirements

Varda, like all employers, must ensure that its employees working in the United States are lawfully authorized to work in the U.S. Additionally, our employees are exposed to and have access to certain export-controlled items. Because our employees are provided access to export-controlled items, our policy is to only hire "U.S. persons" who are permitted to have access to our technology without an export license.

"US person" means: U.S. citizen, U.S. lawful permanent resident, or protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3) (i.e., individual admitted to the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum).