DevOps Engineer - Space & Defense

Approach Venture; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a dynamic startup at the forefront of telemetry and system reliability! As a DevOps Engineer, you'll tackle high-impact challenges, shaping the architecture and tools that empower engineers in industries like aerospace and robotics. This role offers you the chance to work with cutting-edge technology, collaborate in a small, agile team, and directly influence product direction. With a focus on building scalable, fault-tolerant platforms, you'll play a crucial part in driving innovation and improving development workflows. If you're passionate about advancing technology and thrive in a fast-paced environment, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Benefits

Strong equity compensation

Flexible hybrid work environment

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Relocation support

Qualifications

• 3+ years in platform/infrastructure engineering with distributed systems.
• Hands-on knowledge of cloud providers and container orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Design and scale infrastructure for high-throughput data pipelines.
• Collaborate with software engineers to enhance system reliability.

Skills

Cloud Providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD Pipelines

Networking and Service Architecture

Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CDK)

Tools

Terraform

CDK

Kafka

Redpanda

Job description

Direct message the job poster from Approach Venture

Approach Venture | Advancing Frontier Tech with Top Talent

DevOps Engineer – Join a High-Growth Startup Revolutionizing Telemetry and System Reliability

Opportunity Summary

A fast-growing Series A startup is building the future of real-time telemetry and observability tools for advanced machines and mission-critical systems. Backed by top-tier talent from the world’s most innovative companies, this team is creating infrastructure that empowers engineers to build, test, and operate complex systems faster and more reliably. We’re looking for a DevOps Engineer ready to dive into high-impact technical challenges and build the foundational tools that power a highly scalable and fault-tolerant platform. This is an opportunity to join a small, agile engineering team where your ideas will shape architecture, guide product direction, and influence the future of development workflows in industries like aerospace, defense, autonomous systems, and beyond.

About Us

We’re a mission-focused startup founded by veterans of leading companies in aerospace, big tech, and deep-tech software. Our platform gives engineers deep visibility into high-frequency telemetry data, solving the bottlenecks that slow down development and testing in critical environments. With customers building spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, and robotics platforms, our software is enabling faster iterations and greater reliability for the world’s most advanced machines.

Job Duties

• Design and scale infrastructure to support a growing customer base and high-throughput data pipelines.
• Collaborate closely with software engineers to boost system performance and reliability.
• Build and maintain CI/CD workflows and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Lead efforts around observability: build robust monitoring, logging, and alerting systems.
• Drive cloud and on-prem deployments—support hybrid environments and multi-cloud architectures.
• Automate environment provisioning, container orchestration, and deployment workflows.
• Prioritize and shape infrastructure roadmap to maximize system performance and team velocity.
• Improve reliability and cost-efficiency across the platform through tooling, automation, and performance tuning.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience with large-scale distributed systems or platform/infrastructure engineering.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Skilled in Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Comfortable working in early-stage, high-ownership startup environments.
• Experience developing or maintaining CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment workflows.
• Knowledge of networking and service architecture across cloud and hybrid environments.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CDK, etc.).

Preferred Experience

• Passion for platform engineering and developer productivity tools.
• Previous work with observability tooling—metrics, tracing, logging frameworks.
• Background in telemetry-heavy systems or real-time data processing.
• Experience with event streaming platforms (Kafka, Redpanda, etc.).
• Exposure to programming languages and tools in the stack: Go, TypeScript, React, Java.
• Experience supporting teams building highly technical or regulated systems (e.g., aerospace, robotics, defense).

Security Clearance

• Must be able to obtain US Secret clearance.

Why Join Us?

• Build software powering some of the world’s most advanced technologies.
• Direct ownership over meaningful systems and architecture.
• Opportunity to shape company culture, product, and processes.
• Strong equity compensation with early-stage upside.
• Flexible hybrid work environment (in-office twice per week).
• Competitive salary and benefits package.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Support for relocation to the Los Angeles area.

Seniority level

Mid-Senior level

Employment type

Full-time

Job function

Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

Defense and Space Manufacturing, Space Research and Technology, and Software Development