DevOps Engineer III

Firefly Aerospace Inc.; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Employee ownership with stock bonuses

$10,000/year for college reimbursement

4% Safe Harbor 401(k) matching

Job summary

Firefly Aerospace Inc. is seeking a DevOps Engineer III in Austin, Texas, to design and manage cloud and on-premises infrastructure for mission-critical spacecraft systems. This position involves deploying applications using Kubernetes and Docker, maintaining CI/CD pipelines, and ensuring high availability of ground systems.

The ideal candidate will hold a BS in Computer Science and have over 5 years of relevant experience. The role offers competitive benefits, including unlimited PTO and employee ownership opportunities.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps or related infrastructure roles.
• Experience deploying containerized applications in production.
• Strong understanding of Infrastructure-as-Code and its tools.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain cloud infrastructure for spacecraft operations.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines for software deployments.
• Collaborate with teams for secure authentication and compliance.

Skills

DevOps

Site Reliability Engineering

Cloud Infrastructure

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD

Terraform

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Job description

Summary

As a DevOps Engineer III at Firefly Aerospace, you will design, deploy, and operate the cloud and on‑premises infrastructure that powers mission‑critical spacecraft ground systems. You will enable reliable, scalable, secure, and highly available software platforms that support spacecraft operations, mission planning, telemetry processing, command execution, and enterprise ground‑segment services.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain cloud and on‑premises infrastructure supporting spacecraft and launch vehicle ground software systems.
• Deploy and operate containerized applications using Kubernetes, Docker, and related orchestration technologies.
• Design and manage scalable environments for distributed microservice architectures supporting mission operations.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC) solutions for provisioning and configuration management.
• Build, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, Argo CD, GitOps methodologies, and related DevOps tooling.
• Deploy and scale enterprise data platforms including message brokers, stream processing frameworks, databases, and observability systems.
• Design highly available and fault‑tolerant architectures supporting mission‑critical operations.
• Assist software development teams with application deployment, performance optimization, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Design and implement cloud architectures within AWS utilizing services such as EKS, EC2, IAM, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and related technologies.
• Develop infrastructure solutions supporting multi‑mission and multi‑tenant ground system deployments.
• Collaborate with cybersecurity and IT teams to implement secure authentication, authorization, auditing, and compliance controls.
• Support capacity planning, infrastructure sizing, performance analysis, and system scalability assessments.
• Implement and maintain observability solutions including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and operational dashboards.
• Support software deployments across development, integration, test, staging, and production environments.
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and operational readiness activities.
• Contribute to architecture reviews and technology evaluations to improve reliability, scalability, and maintainability of Firefly ground systems.

Required Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform Engineering, or related infrastructure roles.
• Experience deploying and operating containerized applications using Kubernetes or Docker Swarm in production environments.
• Experience designing and supporting distributed microservice architectures.
• Hands‑on experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, Argo CD, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or similar tools.
• Experience managing cloud infrastructure within AWS.
• Strong understanding of Infrastructure‑as‑Code concepts and tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar platforms.
• Experience administering Linux‑based systems in production environments.
• Knowledge of networking fundamentals including load balancing, TLS, DNS, VPNs, routing, and firewall concepts.
• Experience implementing authentication and authorization solutions using IAM, SSO, LDAP, Active Directory, OAuth2, OIDC, or similar technologies.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, observability, and operational support practices.
• Strong troubleshooting and performance analysis skills across infrastructure, applications, and networking layers.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
• Experience supporting spacecraft, aerospace, defense, satellite, or other mission‑critical operational systems.
• Experience operating large‑scale Kubernetes platforms supporting multiple applications and tenants.
• Experience deploying and scaling data streaming and event‑driven platforms such as Apache Pulsar, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or similar technologies.
• Experience with time‑series databases and telemetry‑focused data architectures.
• Experience deploying and managing observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, or similar tools.
• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud and regulated cloud environments.
• Experience implementing high‑availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity architectures.
• Familiarity with cybersecurity frameworks including NIST 800‑171, RMF, CMMC, or related compliance standards.
• Active security clearance.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO for exempt employees
• 3‑month sabbatical for every 5 years of service
• Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance
• Mental health services
• Paid military leave
• 12 weeks paid maternity leave
• 4 weeks paid spouse leave
• $20,000 towards family planning: fertility, surrogacy, adoption
• Dog‑friendly workplace
• $10,000/year towards trade school or college
• Ongoing coaching to advance leadership skills
• Employee‑ownership with stock bonuses
• 4% Safe Harbor 401(k) matching
• $10,000 bonus for home purchase in Cedar Park, Texas

Firefly offers outstanding benefits for our employees, including generous health, dental and vision plans with low plan deductibles, parental leave, educational reimbursement, short‑term disability, and flexible PTO options.

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Firefly Aerospace, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Firefly is governed based on merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.