Senior Cloud Systems Engineer

Are you passionate about shaping the future of humanity's presence in space? Lunar Outpost, an industry leader in space robotics and planetary vehicles, invites you to join our team! Lunar Outpost is dedicated to creating a permanent presence in space, while also driving positive impacts here on Earth. Currently, we are seeking a Senior Cloud Systems Engineer   to contribute to our mission in a dynamic startup environment .
The main responsibilities of this role include managing Stargate deployments in production, ensuring high availability and uptime, executing reliable releases, and driving operational excellence through comprehensive monitoring, metrics, and infrastructure management .   Stargate is a next-generation Command and Control (C2) platform—the ground software that enables and empowers all Lunar Outpost missions, including the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program. As mission-agnostic software used by all operators in mission control, Stargate's reliability and uptime are critical to mission success.
Take the #NextLeap with Lunar Outpost and work on the Pegasus LTV, which will carry NASA astronauts farther than they've ever been before on the lunar surface!
Key Responsibilities:
Own and manage Stargate production releases and deployment pipelines using  GitOps  practices
Drive operational excellence initiatives including metrics collection, log aggregation, uptime monitoring, KPI tracking, and SIM   Integration
Maintain and achieve 99.99% (four nines) to 99.999% (five nines) uptime SLAs
Design, develop, and  maintain  Helm charts for Stargate and related infrastructure components
Implement and manage progressive deployment strategies including canary deployments and blue-green deployments
Oversee critical Kubernetes infrastructure including volume management, DNS configuration, load balancer provisioning, and secret   monitoring/management
Manage and  optimize  Kubernetes deployments and related AWS services
Implement and  maintain  observability stack using  OpenTelemetry  for comprehensive monitoring and alerting
Collaborate with engineering teams to  establish  and enforce operational best practices and reliability standards
Required Qualifications:
5+ years of production DevOps/SRE experience with demonstrable  track record  of  maintaining  high-availability systems
Kubernetes administration experience with elevated cluster access in production environments
Strong  proficiency  writing and  maintaining  Helm charts for complex, multi- component  applications
Hands-on experience implementing canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and other progressive delivery patterns
Deep knowledge of Kubernetes infrastructure management: persistent volumes, DNS/networking, load balancers, and secrets management
Production experience with  GitOps  workflows and Flux CD
Proven  track record   maintaining  99.99%+ uptime in production environments
Excellent judgment and decision-making skills when working with production systems
Familiarity with Aetherflux for declarative canary orchestration and progressive rollout gating
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with AWS cloud services, particularly EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), Secrets Manager, VPC networking, IAM, and AWS Load Balancers
Experience with Karpenter for Kubernetes node autoscaling and cluster optimization
Experience with  OpenTelemetry  instrumentation and observability platforms
Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, or CKS)
Experience building and  maintaining  CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.)
Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform,  CDK )
Experience implementing SRE practices including SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
Compensation & Benefits: Compensation level and base salary are competitively structured and thoughtfully determined based on factors such as relevant skills, experience, education, and the scope of the role.
Comprehensive health coverage: Medical, dental, and vision benefits, with 70% of premiums covered by the employer
Paid time off: Three (3) weeks per year of vacation
Retirement plan: Up to 4% employer match on 401(k) contributions
Paid holidays: 11 company-recognized holidays
Parental leave
Educational reimbursement opportunities to support company objectives, continued learning, and career development
Lunar Outpost Inc. is an equal opportunity  employer. Lunar Outpost Inc. does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), national origin, ethnicity, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. All employees, including executives and human resources personnel, are expected to conduct themselves with professionalism and treat others with dignity and respect in accordance with this policy.