Senior SRE 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. 

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

Responsibilities

• Lead the deployment, maintenance, and operations of mission-critical applications and IT infrastructure supporting spacecraft systems, ground control, and company-wide platforms.
• Design and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks with tools such as Terraform and Ansible; implement monitoring and alerting solutions with InfluxDB, Grafana, and related observability stacks.
• Architect and manage cloud services in Azure GCC High and hybrid on-prem/cloud environments, ensuring compliance with government and aerospace-grade security standards.
• Oversee the migration, integration, and administration of enterprise software and services, modernizing legacy systems into scalable, cloud-native, or containerized platforms.
• Implement and maintain GitOps practices with Argo CD to enable secure, reliable, and automated deployments to Kubernetes clusters.
• Partner with software and hardware engineers to deliver highly operable, reliable, and scalable systems and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring rapid iteration and mission readiness.
• Drive efforts to identify, analyze, and resolve system bottlenecks and reliability risks; lead performance tuning and long-term stability initiatives across cloud, networking, and storage layers.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, providing technical leadership during incidents and ensuring critical systems remain healthy and responsive.
• Occasionally travel to customer sites and other Varda locations to troubleshoot, deploy, or validate infrastructure in mission-critical environments.

 

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

• 10+ years of DevOps, site reliability engineering, or system administration experience 
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure