Staff Software Engineer, Enterprise Services

Staff Software Engineer, Enterprise Services

About Us:

BlackSky is a real-time intelligence company. We own and operate the world's most advanced space-based intelligence platform and provide customers satellite imagery, automated analytics and high-frequency monitoring of strategic locations, economic assets and events from around the globe. BlackSky is trusted by the most demanding allied military and intelligence organizations and commercial companies to deliver foresight into critical matters that affect national security and the economy. BlackSky's data enables governments and businesses to see, understand and anticipate change as it happens, giving them the ultimate strategic advantage so they can act quickly. Our global team works with cutting-edge technology to make a difference around the world and prides itself on being people-first, customer-focused and fun.

We are seeking an experienced Software Engineer with a background in Kubernetes and Infrastructure as a Service to join our Enterprise Services Team. In this role you will design, develop, deploy, and migrate enterprise grade solutions for both internally hosted and customer hosted solutions. 

You will work with internal stakeholders and high-profile customers to deliver customized solutions that integrate functionality with our core systems. These systems are cloud native, docker deployed, or Kubernetes managed systems with a focus on bringing your expertise in Kubernetes to the larger team. We’re looking for someone who brings strong development experience and can collaborate effectively with DevOps and Infrastructure teams. Candidates should have experience migrating existing applications to Kubernetes as well as GitHub and GitOps workflows and tools for continuous development.

Strong written and verbal communications skills are essential. The candidate will also be expected to mentor other developers on Kubernetes best practices and deployment strategies that align with the company's overall goals, strategies, and policies. 

This role is remote and candidates and will report to the Manager of Enterprise Services. The team operates primarily on East Coast time. While the locations listed in the job posting are ideal, we would love candidates near our Herndon, VA office. We may also consider remote candidates in certain states.

Responsibilities:

• Work with a team of senior software engineers to deliver high-quality, customer-facing or customer deployed software integrations to our core platform capabilities. This includes API development, infrastructure as a service development, production system monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Collaborate with other software engineer teams and product management to refine requirements towards implementable solutions that meet customer needs.
• Participate in peer mentorship and peer-led code review processes to produce high quality, maintainable, software-based solutions.
• Design solutions to complex problems and present such designs for review.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and highly available enterprise service solutions in customer and internal environments.
• Support migration efforts of legacy enterprise services to modern containerized and Kubernetes-based deployments using GitOps methodologies.
• Develop automation pipelines for provisioning infrastructure, deploying services, and managing configuration changes using tools like Terraform and ArgoCD.
• Other job-related duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent.
• A minimum of ten (10) years of professional software development experience.
• At least five years of experience in Java.
• Proficiency in at least one other programming language (Python preferred).
• Experience with Infrastructure as a Service technology such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Experience with AWS technologies such as ECS, EKS, RDS, SQS, and Lambda.
• Production experience deploying, troubleshooting, and monitoring Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with distributed systems and network security.
• Strong knowledge of object-oriented design and system architecture.
• Strong knowledge of building and deploying containerized Linux environments.
• The program this role supports requires being a US-born citizen.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience as a tech lead or co-lead preferred. 
• Proven experience migrating services and applications from traditional infrastructure to Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor others.