Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About Varda

Low Earth orbit is open for business. Varda is accelerating the development of commercial space infrastructure, from in-orbit pharmaceutical processing to reliable and economical reentry capsules. 

From life-saving pharmaceuticals to more powerful fiber optics, there is a world of products used on Earth today that can only be manufactured in space. Varda is accelerating innovation in the orbital economy by creating both the products and infrastructure needed so space can directly benefit life on Earth. Our mission is to expand the economic bounds of humankind. 

Our team is uniquely suited to accomplishing this goal, with leadership and staff comprised of veterans from SpaceX, Blue Origin, major pharmaceutical companies and Silicon Valley. Varda was founded in January 2021 by Will Bruey and Delian Asparouhov with significant backing from world class investors including Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, Caffeinated Capital, General Catalyst, and Also Capital. 

Varda is headquartered in El Segundo, California, where we have offices and a production facility where our vehicles, equipment, and materials are built, integrated, and tested. Varda also has offices in Washington, DC and Huntsville, AL (coming soon).

Join Varda, and work to create a bustling in-space ecosystem.

 

About This Role

As a 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. You’ll wear multiple hats: DevOps, SRE, and IT operations, all in one. You’ll move fast, think creatively, and have a tremendous impact on mission-critical systems both on Earth and in space. 

Our tech-stack includes: 

• Azure 
• Docker and Kubernetes 
• Terraform 
• Grafana 
• InfluxDB 
• Bamboo 
• Windows and Linux 
• Python 

This is a full-time, exempt position located in our El Segundo headquarters.

Responsibilities

• Deploy, upgrade, maintain, and operate mission critical applications and IT infrastructure for the spacecraft and the company 
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code (IaC) with tools like Terraform, Ansible, and integrated monitoring solutions. 
• Collaborate 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 and address performance bottlenecks, and implement performance improvement techniques 
• Rotate through the team’s on-call schedule to keep critical systems healthy and responsive. 
• Occasionally travel to customer sites and other Varda locations to troubleshoot, deploy, or test critical infrastructure. 

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, or engineering discipline; experience with site reliability or DevOps (in lieu of a degree) 
• Professional experience building, deploying, and troubleshooting IT systems. 
• Positive and strong communication skills, both written and oral 
• Proven track record of adapting in a fast-paced, detail-oriented environment 
• Ability to prioritize workflows effectively according to multiple criteria 
• Experience with Linux and Windows servers in physical and virtualized enterprise level environments 
• Experience with on-premises and cloud networking technologies 
• Python, Bash, PowerShell (or similar) scripting experience  

Preferred Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of DevOps, site reliability engineering, or system administration experience 
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure 
• Experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) and technologies for automatically managing servers 
• Experience with both container and vir