Mission Control DevOps Engineer

Here at The Exploration Company, we are developing, producing, and operating Nyx, a modular and reusable space orbital vehicle that can eventually be refuelled in orbit and that can carry cargo - and potentially humans in the longer run. As a Mission Control DevOps Engineer, you will own the cloud infrastructure that powers the Nyx ground segment — the backbone of our mission operations. You will design, deploy, and maintain the systems that our flight controllers and ground software teams depend on around the clock. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role at the intersection of aerospace and modern cloud engineering. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Design and operate the AWS cloud infrastructure underpinning Nyx ground segment software, including compute (EC2), container orchestration (EKS), relational databases (RDS), block and file storage (EBS, EFS), and object storage (S3). - Build and maintain scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant infrastructure to ensure mission-critical uptime during launch, flight, and re-entry operations. - Manage Kubernetes clusters (EKS) — including node group scaling, cluster upgrades, networking (CNI, ingress), RBAC, and workload scheduling for ground segment services. - Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate the build, test, and deployment of ground segment software with minimal operator intervention. - Define infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform or AWS CDK, ensuring all environments are reproducible and version-controlled. - Monitor system health and reliability, setting up observability stacks (metrics, logging, alerting) to proactively detect and resolve issues before they impact mission operations. - Enforce security and compliance best practices across all infrastructure — including IAM policies, network segmentation, secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit, and vulnerability patching. - Manage data storage and retention strategies for telemetry, command logs, and mission data across RDS, S3, EBS, and EFS. - Participate in on-call rotations and incident response during mission-critical windows, including launch campaigns. - Collaborate closely with ground software, flight software, and mission operations teams to understand operational requirements and translate them into robust infrastructure solutions. WHAT WE WOULD LOVE TO SEE FROM YOU - 3+ years of experience in a DevOps or Cloud Infrastructure role. - Deep hands-on experience with AWS services: EC2, EKS, RDS, EBS, EFS, and S3. - Strong proficiency with Kubernetes — cluster management, Helm charts, resource configuration, and troubleshooting. - Solid experience with Infrastructure as Code — Terraform, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation. - Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent). - Strong understanding of networking concepts: VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancers, DNS, and VPNs. - Practical experience with AWS KMS — managing customer-managed keys (CMKs), defining key policies, enabling automatic key rotation, and integrating KMS across storage and database services. - Experience with observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar. - A security-first mindset with practical knowledge of AWS IAM, secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager / HashiCorp Vault), and compliance frameworks. NICE TO HAVE - Experience in the aerospace, defense, or mission-critical systems domain. - Experience with multi-region or disaster recovery architectures. - Familiarity with real-time or high-throughput telemetry data pipelines. - AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer – Professional). - Exposure to FedRAMP or ISO 27001 compliance environments. Why you should join us! What makes us special here at The Exploration Company and why we think you will enjoy working here is: - We’re Agile - we make decisions fast whilst keeping our goals and systems in mind - We’re Open and Collaborative - we are transparent about risks and obs